This article titled "Human waste turned into renewable gas to power homes" was written by Tim Webb, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 5th October 2010 06.00 UTC

Next time you flush the toilet, you could be doing your bit for green energy. After being stored for 18 days, human waste will from today be returning to homes in the form of renewable gas.

Centrica is opening a plant at Didcot sewage works which will be the first in the UK to produce renewable gas for households to use.

National Grid believes that at least 15% of all gas consumed could be made from sewage slurry, old sandwiches and other food thrown away by supermarkets, as well as organic waste created by businesses such as breweries.

However, there are fears in the industry that the government's spending cuts could make it more difficult for companies to come up with the £10bn needed to develop the new plants and pipelines.

Because it is more expensive to produce renewable gas, companies say they need to be paid twice the market rate for it to make economic sense.

But a proposed subsidy, scheduled to come into force in April, has yet to be approved and there is speculation that the government could delay or scrap it.

The Didcot facility is a pilot project to demonstrate the technology and will supply about 200 homes with gas. The project is a joint venture between Thames Water, British Gas and Scotia Gas Networks.

One industry expert likened the process to a "cow's stomach on a life support machine". The sewage sludge is collected in air-tight vats which are heated and enzymes added to speed the anaerobic digestion process and break down the material. Methane is produced and then it is purified ready for use.

Landfill sites can also produce methane gas which is then typically used to generate electricity. But British Gas says supplying renewable gas directly is much more efficient, as about two thirds of the energy is lost when electricity is generated.

This Friday, Adnams the brewer will open an anaerobic digestion facility in Suffolk using waste slurry which will provide renewable gas to about 235 homes. British Gas is also involved in this project and is planning to open three more.

Gearóid Lane, managing director of communities and new energy at British Gas, said: "This renewable gas project is a real milestone in Britain's energy history, and will help customers and the environment alike. Renewable gas has the potential to make a significant contribution to meeting the UK's energy needs. Gas from sewage is just one part of a bigger project, which will see us using brewery and food waste and farm slurry to generate gas to heat homes."

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This article titled “Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi obituary” was written by Trevor Mostyn, for The Guardian on Wednesday 10th March 2010 19.01 UTC

Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who has died aged 81 of a heart attack while in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, used his position as one of Islam’s leading spiritual authorities to champion Islamic moderation worldwide. In 1996, the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, had appointed Tantawi grand imam of the Al-Azhar mosque and head of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s pre-eminent centre of learning, a position he held until his death. He shared platforms with the Prince of Wales and, in 2008, spoke at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on the value of dialogue between civilisations.

At the same time, he provoked a fierce backlash from Islamic hardliners, not least for his condemnation of the niqab, or full-face veil, a position he broadcast widely last year during the debate over its prohibition in France. In 2009, he banned women wearing the full veil from entering Al-Azhar’s campus.

Crucially, he described the 9/11 attacks as “acts of terror directed against innocent people”, and went further. Countries harbouring terrorists, he insisted, should be “punished and held in contempt”. He told a conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2003: “Extremism is the enemy of Islam.” He condemned suicide bombings, telling the press: “If it is against… women, children and old men, then it is not resistance but infidelity.”

In November 2008, there were calls in Egypt for his resignation after he shook hands with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, at a UN-sponsored interfaith conference in New York. He initially astonished reporters by claiming that he was unaware that it was Peres approaching him with outstretched hand. Subsequently, he accused those who published the pictures of the handshake as being a group of lunatics. He then fanned the controversy by saying that if any Israeli officials wanted to visit Al-Azhar, he would welcome them.

The following month a Muslim Brotherhood MP, Hamdi Hassan, complained that “Tantawi acts like a government employee. He wants to please the regime. He does not represent himself, however, but Al-Azhar and Muslims as a whole. Tantawi has a habit of insulting those who disagree with him and he offends Al-Azhar in the process.” Tantawi then tried but failed to placate his critics by demanding that Israel end tyrannical practices against the Palestinians.

Tantawi had sparked intense debate in the Islamic world early in 2002 when he chaired a conference in Alexandria alongside Jewish rabbis. The conference was attended by the then archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. He had provoked similar anger when he met Israel Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, at Al-Azhar in 1997.

As grand mufti of Egypt from 1986 to 1996, he outraged hardline Muslims by ruling that fixed interest rates on bank deposits are halal (allowed), in the face of a traditional Islamic consensus that all interest rates are haram (forbidden). His critics accused him of acting as a puppet of Mubarak’s increasingly oppressive regime. Although Al-Azhar had been founded as a Fatimid seat of learning in 970, and later converted to Sunnism when Saladin expelled the Fatimids in 1171, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was in constant conflict with the hardline Muslim Brotherhood, all Al-Azhar appointments were made by the government and continue to be. Tatwani is likely to be replaced by his deputy, Mohammed Wasel, until the president has appointed a new head.

When Prince Charles visited Egypt in March 2006, shortly after the furore involving Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Tantawi quoted the prince telling the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in 1993: “It is odd in many ways that misunderstandings between Islam and the west should exist. For that which binds our worlds together is so much more powerful than that which divides us.” Tantawi told the Kuala Lumpur conference: “I do not subscribe to the idea of a clash of civilisations. People of different beliefs should co-operate and not get into senseless conflicts and animosity.”

He was born in the village of Selim ash-Sharqiyah in the municipality of Tama, Sohag, before joining a religious institution in Alexandria. After graduating from Al-Azhar’s faculty of religious studies in 1958, he went on to teach. In 1966 he was awarded a PhD in Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad, Islam’s second source after the Qur’an itself) and Tafsir, exegesis of the Qur’an. By 1980, he was the head of the Tafsir department of the University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, a position he was to hold until 1984.

In 1986, when he had been dean of the faculty of Arab and religious studies for a year, he became grand mufti of Egypt, a position he held for a decade until appointed grand imam. He is survived by two sons and a daughter.

• Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, cleric, born 28 October 1928; died 10 March 2010

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This article was written by Kim Willsher in Paris, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th April 2010 18.44 UTC

Few things define the traditional good life in France better than champagne and foie gras, but few would have thought them symbols of social integration – until now.

A boom in sales of halal products, including alcohol-free bubbly and goose liver paté approved by Islamic law, is being driven by the emergence of an affluent middle class of young Muslims.

Known as the beurgeois – a play on bourgeois and the word beur, slang for a French person of North African descent – these new consumers are behind a rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks.

With spending power worth an estimated €5.5bn a year, according to the opinion pollsters Solis, these under-40s are forcing international food suppliers to cater for their demands.

Yanis Bouarbi, 33, an IT specialist who started the website paris-hallal.com, which lists restaurants in France serving halal food, says young Muslims are at the heart of a mini social revolution.

"When our parents and grandparents came to France they did mostly manual work and the priority was having enough to feed the family," said Bouarbi, who arrived from Algeria at the age of three.

"But second or third-generation people like me have studied, have good jobs and money and want to go out and profit from French culture without compromising our religious beliefs. We don't just want cheap kebabs, we want Japanese, Thai, French food; we want to be like the rest of you."

The demand for halal products, currently increasing by an estimated 15% a year, has captured the attention of food giants such as the supermarket group Casino, which has stocked an increasing variety of halal foods – mostly meat products – for the last three years.

The fast-food chain Quick has a number of halal-only burger bars; the opening of the most recent caused a political storm before the regional elections last month, but the row has since blown over.

Muslim corner shops selling exclusively halal foods and drinks including eggs, turkey bacon and pork-free sausages as well as alcohol-free "champagne", known as Cham'Alal, are also flourishing.

Halal foie gras, first introduced into supermarket chains across the country two years ago at the end of the Muslim feast of Ramadan, has proved an unexpected success. "It's one of our best sellers; we have around 30 foie gras bought a day," Cyril Malinet, manager of a major Carrefour supermarket, told Libération.

Annick Fettani, head of Bienfaits de France, which specialises in halal duck, said: "Until now we've had to fight to sell our foie gras but today everyone wants it."

Bouarbi believes the halal boom is taking place because young Muslims have more money. His website now lists more than 400 restaurants in Paris and its suburbs, and he plans to expand it to other French cities.

In Paris's trendy 11th arrondissement, Les Enfants Terribles restaurant, run by brothers Kamel and Sosiane Saidi, serves halal French haute cuisine. "Before, Muslims wishing to eat halal would go to a restaurant and it was fish or nothing. Now we have a choice," said Sosiane, 28, who worked in the property market before setting up the restaurant three years ago.

"Young Muslims have money and want to eat out like everyone else but according to their religion. The food doesn't taste any different; we have many French customers who don't even know we're totally halal. To us, that is what integration is about."

Like Yanis and Sosiane, younger members of France's estimated 5 million-strong Muslim community – with whom relations have been strained by the recent debate on national identity and threats by Nicolas Sarkozy's right-of-centre government to ban the burqa – are asserting their economic muscle. As one French website put it, halal is "very good business" for French companies.

"Supermarkets aren't benevolent charities, they're in it for the money," said Bouarbi. "And they've discovered halal sells."

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This article titled “Resource wars: the global crisis behind BHP Billiton’s bid for Potash Corp” was written by Richard Wachman, for The Observer on Saturday 21st August 2010 23.06 UTC

BHP Billiton’s £28bn hostile bid for Canada’s Potash Corporation sets the scene for one of mining’s biggest takeover battles. But this is more than a clash between multinationals intent on self-aggrandisement.

Certainly, the usual arguments are wheeled out by the predator about diversification, synergies and the prospect of fatter profits, while the target company complains about the offer price being pitched too low.

But behind the rhetoric is a bidding war that lays bare the global struggle for resources on a planet struggling with water and food shortages, overpopulation and pollution. And it highlights a question that overshadows the 21st century: how to provide enough food for a global population that is set to rise from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations.

Potash Corporation, based in Saskatchewan, is the biggest producer of potash, a key component of fertilisers used to maximise the supply of healthy crops. The company also makes nitrogen and phosphate, two other primary constituents of fertiliser products.

With demand for grain rising and less farmland available per person, “the need for fertiliser – especially potash – has never been greater,” says the Potash Corp website.

Giles Parkinson of the Australian business news website Business Spectator says BHP’s bid is not just an attempt to diversify: it’s a major bet that rising food demand will cause a significant growth in the use of the fertiliser.

According to Potash Corp, more people are eating meat, and as incomes rise in developing nations, millions of people are switching from starch to protein-based diets. “Every pound of beef requires seven pounds of grain to produce, and this has a substantial impact on demand,” says a Potash official.

Analysts agree the use of fertiliser is bound to rise in the attempt to feed the world’s growing population. A report from HSBC flagged up its growing importance as extreme weather events increasingly disrupt production. This year’s failure of the Russian wheat harvest, as well as the flooding in Pakistan, are cases in point.

Experts say crop yields are low in many regions, partly due to the historical under-application of fertiliser in many developing countries. China has 20% of the world’s population but just 6% of its arable land – which has dwindled as Chinese industry has ruined previously fertile tracts of ground through pollution and heavy industrialisation. The Fertiliser Institute in Washington says China and India use only half as much potash on their fields as American farmers.

A recent paper published by the Royal Society says there are limits on the amount of land that will become available for crops even though it estimates that global food supplies need to increase by 70% in the next 40 years. But better fertilisers and chemicals could hugely increase yields and cut water use.

No wonder Potash Corp boss Bill Doyle is holding out for a higher price from BHP, the Anglo-Australian colossus headed by Marius Kloppers. Doyle is sitting on a valuable asset, says Charles Kernot, mining analyst at Evolution Securities. “We expect more demand [for fertiliser] from China and other parts of the world where agricultural land must become more productive,” he says.

Before its bid for Potash Corp, BHP had been spending millions in Canada buying up potash deposits and acquiring small producers such as Athabasca for C0m (£210m). But developing a potash business from scratch is viewed as more expensive than buying a business that already accounts for nearly a quarter of global production.

“In one fell swoop, BHP could become one of the most important players in the industry,” says Kernot. “High entry costs favour major acquisitions over digging new mines. It can take seven or eight years to build a new site.”

But Kloppers will almost certainly have to return with a higher price to woo Potash Corp’s investors. The Canadian firm issued a statement last week claiming: “BHP Billiton intentionally launched its proposal just as the fertiliser industry emerges from an unprecedented demand decline associated with the global slowdown in order to seize the value that Potash Corp is poised to create for its shareholders.”

The market for potash plummeted in 2009 as farmers put projects on hold. But the signs are that demand is rebounding after sales fell by a half to 30m tonnes a year ago: Potash Corp’s profits in the first half nearly tripled. In 2008, the price of potash was hovering close to ,000 a tonne, way above the current price of 4. But analysts believe that the cycle is about to change.

Corporations believe it too. Merger and acquisition activity was on the rise months before BHP’s move on Potash Corp: in March, US-based CF Industries agreed to buy rival Terra for .7bn. That deal trumped Canadian company Agrium’s hostile bid for CF, closing a year-long bid battle.

The bidding war for Terra, which produces nitrogen-based fertilisers, came at about the same time as Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov acquired stakes in Uralkali and Silvinit as part of an attempt to combine the two to create the world’s second-largest potash producer – and to establish a Russian champion.

What is happening in the fertiliser sector mirrors the scramble for natural resources throughout the world, as governments and corporations jockey for position to satisfy rising consumption.

For companies, there is the lure of huge profits via consolidation. In the last week alone, there have been two big moves by resources firms. First, Agrium launched a Abn offer for AWB, the Australian wheat trader. Then India’s ambitious minerals group Vedanta Resources announced plans to buy a controlling stake in Cairn Energy’s Indian oil fields. It is the Indian company’s first major investment in oil and marks a milestone in its development as a diversified commodities producer.

In Africa, the Chinese are forging mining joint ventures and investments linked to China’s hunt for resources to fuel its fast-industrialising economy. Africa is also seeing a land grab that has been likened to Europe’s carve-up of the continent at the end of the 19th century. An Observer investigation earlier this year established that 50m hectares – more than double the size of the UK – had been acquired in the last few years by foreign governments and wealthy investors with state subsidies.

Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural schemes since 2007. Saudi Arabia is thought to be the biggest buyer as it turns to Africa to meet domestic demand, a move that helps it to conserve water at home.

Charities have complained that foreign expansion has been at the expense of African smallholders and that overseas investment exacerbates hunger as land is increasingly turned over to growing crops for export. There have also been reports of evictions without compensation, bullying and rising crime.

Some of the African deals have been eye-wateringly large: China has signed a contract with the Democratic Republic of Congo to grow 2.8m hectares of palm oil for biofuels. Before it fell apart after riots, a proposed 1.2m-hectare deal between Madagascar and South Korea’s Daewoo would have included nearly half the country’s arable land.

It is against this backdrop that BHP’s move on Potash Corp should be viewed. Its foray is not without risks, as new technology and GM crops could also play an important role in helping to secure larger and more reliable food supplies. But that is a distant hope at the moment.

BHP has been eyeing Potash Corp for around a year, insiders say. Kloppers knows he will be under pressure if he fails, after his company was forced to withdraw a bid for rival Rio Tinto in late 2008 as the credit crunch worsened.

Potash Corp is bound to seek a white knight in its efforts to extract a higher price, with Chinese competitors and Vale of Brazil possible counter-bidders. But BHP, the world’s largest mining multinational, has more than £7bn of cash and will be hard to dislodge.

Kloppers knows he is on to something big. As food prices head north, fertiliser will play an increasingly important role in boosting supply – something that is critical in a time of uncertainty. HSBC says: “Hoarding and trade barriers for wheat and other soft commodities are a real threat. In the longer term, climate change is likely to increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, flooding, and droughts – with knock-on implications for food output.”

The stakes could scarcely be higher.

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