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Africa’s farmers complain they can no longer predict when the rains or dry heat will come. They sow, but the rains fail, or come late. Seeds perish.

“It doesn’t rain regularly like it used to. It’s a problem for our trees,” said Ivorian cocoa farmer Francois Gueye, his face lit by harsh sun piercing through cocoa leaves. “We thought we’d mastered the rainy season, but not anymore.”

Gueye used to get three tonnes out of his farm in the south Ivory Coast village of Tanokro. Now he gets half a tonne.

The world’s poorest continent is predicted to be the most affected by climate change blamed on human greenhouse gas emissions, although it hasn’t yet been proven that they are the cause of Africa’s worsening droughts and floods.

“Africa is going to be hit the hardest,” said Christian Nellemann of the United Nations Environment Programme.

“In Africa, what used to be predictable is not any more. And rising populations will need feeding – you’re looking at an additional billion people in Africa in 40 years.”

“Already too hot”
As with all climate forecasts, there are big uncertainties. While some cold countries at high latitudes may actually benefit from warmer weather as they will enjoy longer growing seasons, the tropics are likely to suffer, experts say.

“Agriculture in-low latitude developing countries is … especially vulnerable because climates of many of these countries are already too hot,” according to one World Bank assessment.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 forecast that rain-fed crop yields in some nations could halve by 2020. Many climatologists now think that’s too gloomy.

Another study by Stanford University in February predicted that five staple African crops – maize, sorghum, millet, groundnut, cassava – could see yields drop by eight to 22 percent. Africa’s valuable soft commodities are also expected to suffer – West Africa supplies two thirds of the world’s cocoa.

Cotton output has halved in the past five years, with African growers blaming erratic weather as well as US subsidies to its own cotton farmers. Cotton is sensitive to drought. Once planted, the crop quickly perishes with no rain.

“We’ve noticed a late arrival of the rains, coming late June instead of May,” said Nouhoum Traore, technical advisor in charge of production in Africa’s number two grower, Mali. “Every time it happens, we lose a lot of cotton.”

The research director at Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation, Joseph Kimemia, told us that erratic rainfall and excessive drought had hurt coffee production, making crop management and disease control a nightmare.

“Coffee operates within a very narrow temperature range of 19∞25 degrees (Celsius). When you start getting temperatures above that in some cases, trees wilt and dry up,” he said.

In southern Africa, a dry spell has ravaged maize crops.

No easy solution
Solutions to Africa’s climate woes are not all costly. One answer is genetically modified, drought∞resistant seeds, which are helping West Africa cotton. The African Cotton Association says yields may recover 18 percent next season from GM seeds.

Another one is to halt the retreat of Africa’s forests, which provide shade and trap moisture.

“There’s no trees here and its affecting rainfall,” said Brou Kouame, an agro climatologist in Ivory Coast. “We have to put the brakes on deforestation and start replanting trees.”

But analysts say the main solution is investment: African yields are low partly due to lack of fertiliser and irrigation.

“A key thing is rural infrastructure,” said Claudia Ringler of Washington’s International Food Policy Research Institute. “You need paved roads so they don’t keep being flushed away in floods, irrigation. A lot of this is coming from China.”

Sites like Facebook, which has more than 400 million users, rely in large part on people’s willingness to share a wealth of personal information with an ever-expanding network of “friends”, either ones they actually know and see from time to time, or those they have met virtually through the Internet.

Members’ eagerness to add contacts has given the sites a powerful global reach, attracting users from seven to 70 years old, from skateboarders to investment bankers, and with them a deep and potentially rich vein of targeted advertising revenue.

But at the same time it has concentrated vast amounts of data – telephone numbers and addresses, people’s simple likes and dislikes – on the servers of a small number of companies.

In Facebook’s case, the social networking tsunami has spread in barely six years from the Harvard dormroom of founder Mark Zuckerberg, 25, to envelope almost half a billion people – enough to be the world’s third most populous country.

That in turn has raised profound privacy issues, with governments in Europe and North America and Asia concerned about the potential for data theft, for people’s identities to be mined for income or children to be exploited via the Internet.

Data protection authorities from a range of countries held a teleconference in May to discuss how they can work together to protect what they see as a steady erosion of privacy, and the European Union too is studying what role it can play. They may not be able to hold the social networking wave back, but policymakers are looking at what they can do to limit what they see as the “Big Brother” – like role of some sites. A showdown between privacy and Internet freedom is looming.

“We cannot expect citizens to trust Europe if we are not serious in defending the right to privacy,” Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of media and the information society, said in a speech in January, laying out her concerns.

“Facebook, MySpace or Twitter have become extremely popular, particularly among young people,” she told the European Parliament. “However, children are not always able to assess all risks associated with exposing personal data.”

Privacy, meet the web
The privacy debate has been around as long as the Internet, but the explosive growth of social networking, and deepening concern about the impact it may be having on social interaction, has intensified discussion in recent months.

Incidents such as the Israeli soldier who announced details of an upcoming military raid via Facebook, and the murder conviction in Britain of a serial rapist who posed as a boy on the site, have fuelled the fears of both lawmakers and parents.

In 2009 and again this year, Canadian authorities challenged Facebook’s default privacy settings and its use of personal information for targeted advertising. Norway filed complaints after a year-long study of the site’s terms and conditions.

Facebook has added fuel to the debate, with the company deciding in December 2009 to substantially change its privacy settings, effectively making members’ profiles more openly accessible unless users altered the settings themselves. Zuckerberg explained the move in January, saying social behaviour was shifting as a result of the Internet and that privacy was not the same now as it was even six years ago.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” he told an audience at a technology conference. “That social norm is just something that has evolved. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

That may well be the case – and the trend for teenagers to share naked or near∞naked pictures of one another online or via mobile phones may suggest mores are changing – but privacy campaigners believe the slope is getting too slippery.

Thomas Nortvedt, the head of digitial issues at the Norwegian Consumer Council, a government body, sees Facebook’s alteration of its privacy settings as a turning point: “The privacy settings on Facebook have raised awareness on… privacy as a whole, not only by the people but also by the governments and the regulating authorities. They see that this is, if not a problem, then at least a challenge and something has to be done about it.”

As Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, told data protection experts: “We want to send a strong message that you can’t go on using people’s personal information without their consent… Do your testing before, and make sure they comply with privacy legislation.”

With government authorities raising their concerns ever more loudly, Facebook and other sites have amended some of their practices, or highlighted the range of measures they say they are already taking to protect members’ privacy and data.

As a result of the Canadian Privacy Commission’s investigation, Facebook agreed to adopt some recommendations, including explaining why users have to provide their date of birth at registration and introducing ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ privacy settings for user∞published content.

But other recommendations – such as limiting the ability of third-party applications to pull non∞essential user information – were not immediately applied. Though the Commission was satisfied with Facebook’s further proposed privacy changes as of last August, a new investigation began this January in light of the site’s amendments to its privacy policy.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union and its 500 million citizens, does not regulate on privacy issues, leaving it up to the EU’s 27 member states, but it can issue guidelines or directives for corporate practices.

In February, the Commission unveiled its “Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU”, a voluntary pact involving 25 websites that agreed to safety measures for users under 18, including making profiles private and unsearchable by default. But the agreement was drawn up before Facebook announced the changes to its privacy settings, a move that frustrated the EU.

“I can’t understand that,” Commissioner Reding said on the EU’s Safer Internet Day in February. “It’s in the interests of social network sites to give users control of their privacy.”

In the coming months, Reding and her team are expected to study the activities of sites such as Facebook and Google, which recently launched its own social network, and pay close attention to any perceived privacy slippages.

Authorities in Canada, Spain, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands are watching closely too.

The Justice Department said it will now seek to have the court order blocking the original moratorium thrown out, with the administration arguing a pause is needed because of the BP Plc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But opponents may argue the new moratorium is simply a repackaging of the old one and should also be blocked.

The Interior Department attempted to offer more justification for the moratorium in its revised order so it can pass muster with courts which rejected its first suspension order as too broad and arbitrary.

The new ban removes a specific depth of 500 feet and instead focuses on the equipment and technology used by the drillers. It specifically points to new difficulties drillers have had with the blowout preventers used on the relief wells being drilled to kill the rogue BP well.

The administration says the moratorium could be lifted on new wells once drillers provide more evidence of their ability to prevent a blowout and respond adequately should another deepwater catastrophe occur, and detail what assets are available to contain a second spill should it occur.

The new moratorium roughly covers the same period of time, ending by Nov. 30, a move that could draw the ire of drillers and the courts. The original moratorium was issued in late May and was to last six months, i.e. until late November.

“The arguments for a moratorium on deepwater drilling are compelling in the wake of the Gulf tragedy, but the government faces an uphill battle convincing a skeptical federal district court that the new suspension does not simply repackage the moratorium that the court already struck down,” said David Uhlmann, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

The uncertainty means oil companies probably won’t go back to work drilling right away, whatever the courts decide.

Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc and Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc in June won a district court judgment lifting the original moratorium. The Justice Department says that ruling is now moot and will ask an appeals court to vacate the order blocking the original moratorium.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said the legal system probably would not move fast enough for the companies to get back to work as quickly as they would like. “It just takes a long time to grind through.”

In light of that reality, about an hour after the new moratorium was announced, Diamond Offshore said it was moving one of its rigs from the Gulf of Mexico to the coast of Africa.

The Interior Department, in an attempt to show the new moratorium should survive judicial scrutiny, pointed to new information collected and noted that drillers now have an avenue to prove they are operating safely.

Obama administration officials have said repeatedly that a drilling moratorium was needed so they could investigate the cause of the BP well blowout and ensure other rigs are operating safely.

But the administration may again run up against the economic impact of a moratorium, since the district court found the economic harm to the workers and affected communities outweighed the risk of another oil well blowout.

Louisiana officials have said the drilling business is worth $3bn a year to its economy, including more than 20,000 jobs. The state’s governor, Republican Bobby Jindal, has pleaded with the White House to provide some certainty so companies and their employees can get back to work.

But the bulging supermarkets, snappy new airports and gleaming restored temples of this remote and mountainous region cannot hide broad contradictions and a deep sense of unhappiness among many Tibetans that China is sweeping away their culture.

Beijing has spent freely to bring development to restless Tibet, part of a grand strategy to win over the proudly Buddhist people by improving their standard of living.

In Gaba village, a half-hour drive down a bumpy road from downtown Lhasa, Tibet’s bustling capital, residents have seen incomes boom after renting out their farmland to Han Chinese businessmen who grow vegetables there for sale in city markets.

Farmer and Communist Party member Suolang Jiancan shrugs when asked if he is worried about Hans taking away land from native Tibetans, who traditionally have grown barley.

“It is hard for the local people to learn how to grow the vegetables wanted in the market. The Han can teach us these skills, and we can earn more,” he said in his native Tibetan.

The influx of Hans, however, is one of the great sources of tension in Tibet. Many Tibetans resent their presence, saying they do not bother to learn the language and dominate the region’s economy at the expense of the native population.

That is a familiar story to one unemployed graduate of a traditional medicine school. While fashionably dressed and able to speak the fluent Mandarin he learned at school, China’s largesse in Tibet has not been enough to win him a job.

“Development is no good if I cannot get a job,” the man told reporters in Lhasa’s heavily Tibetan old quarter, where patrols of armed paramilitary forces are a constant reminder of China’s determination to keep a tight grip on Tibet.

“The Chinese are suspicious of Tibetans, especially since March 14,” he said, referring to unrest in 2008 ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Frustration at Chinese controls, along with the rise of Han Chinese migrants, boiled over in violent protests in 2008 in Lhasa, in which at least 19 people were killed.

The unrest sparked waves of protest across Tibetan areas, which more than two years on has failed to subside despite a heavy military and police presence and harsh punishment for those who question Beijing’s authority.

The security belies China’s claims to have won over Tibetans.

“To this day, two years later, they still need to use military and police forces to control the situation. Does it sound like they’ve won the hearts of the people?” asked prominent Tibetan blogger Woeser.

China lauds progress
The physical scars the riot left on Lhasa in the form of burned out markets and buildings have long ago been expunged.

Lhasa is starting to look like any other middle-tier Chinese city, with the same fast food outlets and mobile phone stores, and the same unimaginative architecture.

For China, there is no question that what they are doing in Tibet is right.

Over the past 10 years, the central government has poured a massive 310 billion yuan ($46bn) into Tibet, or nearly $15,000 per person, building infrastructure and developing mining, agriculture and tourism.

In January, President Hu Jintao said the government would seek “leap-frog” development in Tibet, raising rural incomes to national levels by 2020. The economy is already growing faster than the rest of China.

Large sums have also gone into restoring monasteries and temples, the centre of life for devoutly Buddhist Tibetans, bolstering government claims that China respects religious rights.

“If we did not have the support and embrace of the local people, we could not have dealt with March 14 so well, nor could we have made the achievements we have over the past 60 years,” said Hao Peng, one of Tibet’s Communist Party deputy bosses.

“We have already won the hearts and minds of the people,” Hao told foreign reporters on a rare, tightly-controlled visit.

What China has failed to do is address the alienation many Tibetans feel in the face of breakneck economic progress.

“Tibet is a special country and its people are special,” said one middle-aged teacher, speaking quietly in a back room behind a shop in Lhasa’s old quarter, centre of the 2008 riots.

“We don’t think about money like Chinese people. We believe in Buddhism, but the Chinese people believe in nothing,” he added, requesting anonymity out of fear for repercussions.

Chinese officials frequently lash out at “distorted” reports in foreign media about Tibet.

Yet there is also a mismatch between the policies China has put in place in trying to modernise a poor and backward region, and Tibet’s unique culture.

“It’s absolutely true that Chinese policy has always been to win over the people by being generous,” said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University in New York.

“They just don’t seem to be able to notice that each time, they mess this up by cracking down on the culture, the history or the religion. They make people pay such a huge price.”

A Chinese crackdown on dissent following the riots has spread to Tibetan intellectuals and critics see little sign of Beijing changing tack in the current climate of tension.

“They just had a big national conference on Tibet in Beijing and pretty much nothing came out of it. It’s striking that there hasn’t been a coherent response,” said Nicholas Bequelin, of New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Religion not encouraged
Much of the Chinese government’s claim to legitimacy in Tibet rests on its self-proclaimed protection of Buddhism.

And while Tibetans appear generally free to pray at temples and make pilgrimages, religion is not encouraged for the young or Communist Party members.

“This is a socialist college, so what need do the students have of temples?” retorted Gesang Qunpei, chancellor of Tibet University, when asked if his students were free to practice their religion. “We’re about science and technology here.”

Religious figures who step out of line can be ruthlessly punished. Rights groups say many monks were arrested after the 2008 protests, and some were tortured in jail. Many others had to attend “re-education” classes and denounce the Dalai Lama.

Beijing also keeps a tight grip on key religious positions, saying it has a historical right to appoint top lamas.

China’s selection in 1995 of its own Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, shortly after the Dalai Lama announced his own choice, has upset many.

The six-year-old boy appointed by the Dalai Lama was taken away by Chinese authorities and has disappeared from public view.

The Beijing-anointed Panchen Lama is spurned by many Tibetans as a fake, especially in Shigatse, a flyblown town several hours drive west of Lhasa that is his traditional seat.

Ask monks in Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo monastery whether they believe China’s Panchen Lama is the real deal and the response is neutral, despite the millions spent on temple renovations.

“I really don’t know,” said one monk, with a broad grin on his face and shrugging his shoulders.

Shigatse’s people are less willing to mince their words.

“We don’t think he is a bad person, but he’s a fake,” said a wiry Tibetan man selling smuggled cigarettes by the side of a street. “Nobody believes in him. We don’t want him.”

Chances are you won’t hit anybody, though you may have to foot the bill for some pricey equipment repairs.

The 200,000-square-foot (18,580-sq-metre) plant runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out 1.5 million pounds (680,400 kg) of cotton yarn every week with a staff of just 71 people spread over three shifts. On the overnight shift, just 11 people run the plant, which sprawls over an area about the size of four football fields.

What’s the secret? Constant investment in automation equipment that allows the highly profitable plant to make more yarn with fewer skilled workers at a price low enough that it can export it to Honduras and the Dominican Republic, where it is knit into T-shirts to be sold by customers including Canada’s Gildan Activewear Inc.

The environment, where hundreds of machines churn away with little human intervention, is worlds away from what plant manager B.B. McGuire saw when he started his first, part-time job in a textile factory in 1973.

“We used to have people running all over each other,” recalled McGuire, 53.

The latest new equipment at the 19-year-old plant, located in a town of 1,465 people near North Carolina’s rural northern border, automates a process of moving rough yarn into the final round of spinning, allowing the four workers to do a job that needed 15 to 20 people with the old gear.

“It wasn’t bad equipment, it’s just that the technology has been updated,” said McGuire. “We couldn’t be competitive without this type of technology.”

The factory has reduced its staff by about 40 percent over the past five years, while boosting production, McGuire said.

While productivity improvement is a goal for pretty much every American manager, the drive is particularly zealous at textile companies like Parkdale, and with good reason. Mills have been falling likes flies in this country. According to industry lobbying group the National Council of Textile Organisations, more than 200 have closed since 2005, when the nations of the World Trade Organisation agreed to drop the quotas that once regulated the global trade in fabric and  clothing.

But if the industry has declined, it hasn’t disappeared. About 410,000 Americans still worked in textile and apparel manufacturing as of May – more than worked in broadcasting or making electric appliances – according to government data. Still, that represents about one-quarter of the 1.6 million people who worked in apparel and textile factories back in 1990.

The common theme among the companies that have survived and thrived is technology: run high-speed, highly automated equipment or make specialised, highly engineered fabrics that cannot easily be copied at a lower cost.

The industry has long railed against what it describes as unfair Chinese trade practices and even with Beijing’s recent move to allow the yuan to float more freely versus the dollar, it regards China as a major competitive threat.

“Let them have the business”
A decade ago, Allen Gant looked at Glen Raven mills and realised the company his grandfather founded in 1880 after serving in the U.S. Civil War had a problem.

About 90 percent of the fabric it produced was basic cotton twill and denim used in clothing, which could easily be produced at a lower price outside the US. An even bigger problem was that his customers – apparel factories – were fleeing his home country and setting up shop in Mexico and China, where costs were far lower.

It was time for a change, Gant realised.

 ”We just said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re going to use our resources and assets only for markets in which we have an opportunity to compete on a global basis, and we’re not going to follow cost as a competitive strategy. If somebody can do it cheaper somewhere else, then for gosh sakes, let them have the business,'” said Gant, 63, who serves as president of the Glen Raven, North Carolina-based mill.

The company turned its focus to its Sunbrella line, fabrics designed to stand up to prolonged exposure to sunshine or bleach without fading. It can cost about four times as much as some of its less highly engineered rivals, but lasts far longer when used in an awning, as the roof of a convertible car or on patio furniture that’s exposed to the elements.

Today, Glen Raven ships fabric made at its Anderson, South Carolina factory to Chinese furniture manufacturers, who use it to cover sofas and lawn chairs that they then ship back to the US. Recognising that nation’s growing importance as a furniture manufacturing centre, Glen Raven in 2006 opened a factory in Suzhou, outside Shanghai, where it makes some of the fabric it sells in China. About half of its 2,500-plus employees are based outside the US, mainly at plants in China and France.

It sells the Chinese-made fabrics at prices comparable to what it charges for U.S.-produced goods.

It also makes a range of engineered fabrics used in everything from lining the ceilings of cars to producing camouflage netting the U.S. military uses to hide troops and vehicles from enemy radar.

The common theme among all these products, Gant said, is that they cannot be easily copied, which means the company faces little direct competition from rivals in low-wage nations. Apparel fabrics today represent about one percent of production.

“Costs are important – don’t get me wrong, we work hard on our costs – but it’s really the innovation that makes a difference,” Gant said. “Would we like to find a penny (of cost savings) a yard somewhere? Yeah, absolutely. Does that keep us from doing business? Absolutely not. And quite frankly, if a penny a yard keeps you from doing business, you’re in the wrong business.”

More than less
Parkdale and Glen Raven’s focus on technology has made them survivors in an industry littered with stories of failure.

Industry giants including Burlington Industries, J.P. Stevens and Avondale Mills have all sought bankruptcy protection or closed outright over the past decade, though portions of Burlington live on in International Textile Group Inc, a company created by private equity investor Wilbur Ross in the early 2000s out of the wreckage of several bankrupt companies.

The companies that have survived have found ways to do more with less. Through automation and cost cutting, U.S. textile mills boosted their output per hour of work by about 49 percent from 1998 through 2008, according to Labour Department data.

“When you walk into these plants, it’s hard to find people,” said Blanton Godfrey, dean of North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles in Raleigh. “A lot of times, you go to these textile companies and people think they’re not doing well because their parking lots are half full. Well, the parking lots were built 20 years ago when you needed lots of people. You don’t need as many people today.”

While improved productivity may be good news for the surviving mills, it holds a downside – fewer jobs.

Overall employment in the industry is down about 40 percent over the past five years, a trend that reflects mill closures, higher productivity and the closing of many apparel factories in the region. Garment manufacturing remains far more labour-intensive, with factories still featuring rows of hundreds of workers manning sewing machines in configurations that would be familiar to the European immigrants who flocked to New York City dress factories almost a century ago.

The decline in the number of jobs available has even prompted some institutions that were once closely allied with the industry to pull away from it. For instance, Philadelphia University, which for most of its history was known as the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, in recent years has dropped its undergraduate major in textile engineering.

“You do not want to take a 17- or 18-year-old person and give them such a narrow focus,” said David Brookstein, dean of the School of Engineering and Textiles, which still offers graduate level specialisation in textiles.

Even in southern towns that were once dominated by textile mills, some have grown wary of working for the industry.

Jack Woodson, director of operations at Glen Raven’s one million square foot (92,900 sq metre) plant in Anderson, South Carolina, said when skilled jobs come open at the plant, it can be difficult to lure experienced textile workers, who have experienced a layoff or two at prior jobs, to return.

“The middle aged, experienced worker says, ‘I don’t know if I want to go back to textiles,'” said Woodson, 43, who followed his father and grandfather to work in the mills. “It is a staffing challenge for us.”

Rather, experienced manufacturing workers gravitate toward the cluster of automotive parts suppliers that have sprung up nearby to serve BMW’s U.S. plant in Spartanburg, about 60 miles to the northeast.

Privacy policy
Another common trait of both Glen Raven and Parkdale is that both have been family owned throughout their history, which has allowed them to invest in new equipment even during the recent brutal recession and make decisions like Glen Raven’s to pull out of the apparel business.

The heads of both companies said they were highly profitable and growing, but declined to discuss dollar amounts.

“We have the opportunity to invest for the long term,” said Anderson Warlick, president of Parkdale, which has its headquarters in Gastonia, North Carolina. “We don’t have to worry about a bad quarter or making an irrational decision based on some knee-jerk reaction to a share price. It gives us a little bit of a longer-term view, and I think that is starting to pay off.”

At a time when most other U.S. textile companies are cutting back production, Parkdale is reopening some idle plants, including a facility in Graniteville, South Carolina, that reopened recently and another in Gaffney, South Carolina, that it plans to reopen later this year.

All told it employs some 4,000 people today in 36 mills spread across the US, as well as Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Canada and Thailand. Its constant investment in automation equipment allows it, like Glen Raven, to export U.S.-made yarn to China.

“We have quite a bit of yarn going from Rabun Gap, Georgia, to China,” said Warlick, 53.

Still, success hasn’t been limited to private companies. Unifi Inc, which makes polyester and nylon yarn, has recently returned to a profit, posting three straight quarters of earnings after a four-year streak of losses.

That Charlotte, North Carolina-based company, which has $178.7m in publicly traded bonds, regards access to the public capital markets as critical given the high cost of financing its heavy equipment.

“There is a downside to being a public versus a private company. Being public, you obviously have much more accounting and reporting and regulatory standards … and you provide information to the rest of the marketplace,” said Chief Financial Officer Ron Smith. “But at the end of the day, our ability to access the capital markets and the high-yield market to refinance our debt is our biggest advantage.”

Next steps
At North Carolina’s College of Textiles, meanwhile, researchers are focused on probing the frontiers of fabric technology, finding uses for mill products in everything from the stents that doctors use to prop open blood vessels in patients with heart disease, to ways of using nano-scale carbon fibers in lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars.

Scientists at the school’s Raleigh, North Carolina campus are also working on developing cutting-edge protective equipment for firefighters and other emergency response personnel.

There, Professor Donald Thompson spends his days putting protective jackets, gloves and other garments through a barrage of tests including one chamber where sensor-loaded dummies are dressed up in protective gear and blasted with flames to test fireproofing. Actual people test the comfort of clothing in a climate controlled room where they face temperatures ranging from -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 degrees Centigrade) to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Centigrade).

“In order to understand comfort, you have to make people uncomfortable,” Thompson said of the barrage of tests. “It’s hard to make someone feel more comfortable. So we make them uncomfortable first and then they can perceive being less uncomfortable.”

The undergraduates entering the school also seem to be more interested in testing their own comfort zones in their careers.

“Traditionally, a lot of the students came to the college because they didn’t want to leave North Carolina and they could get a good textile job in North Carolina,” said Godfrey, the school’s dean. “Now a lot of the graduates want to go work in the world or work in Wisconsin or California or New York. A lot of them are going because the opportunities are everywhere.”

Four years ago, just after giving birth to her second child, the stay-at-home mother heard about BPA, a chemical inside some plastics that can leach into water or food slowly over time, potentially causing serious health problems like cancer. Unwilling to take any risks, she ran to Babies “R” Us, which had a programme to exchange baby bottles containing BPA, and walked out with $100 in rebates.

If only life were so easy.

What Sprague didn’t realise is that BPA, or bisphenol A, is ubiquitous. Simply put, just about anything you eat that comes out of a can – from Campbell’s Chicken Soup and SpaghettiOs to Diet Coke and BumbleBee Tuna – contains the same exact chemical.

The exposure to BPA from canned food “is far more extensive” than from plastic bottles, said Shanna Swan, a professor and researcher at the University of Rochester in New York. “It’s particularly concerning when it’s lining infant formula cans.”

BPA is the key compound in epoxy resin linings that keep food fresher longer and prevents it from interacting with metal and altering the taste. It has been linked in some studies of rats and mice to not only cancer but also obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Trade groups for chemical and can manufacturers say they stand behind the chemical, and point to some studies from governmental health agencies that deem BPA safe and effective for food contact. They also note that its use has substantially reduced deaths from food poisoning.

But in January, the US Food and Drug Administration for the first time expressed “some concern” about BPA. Propelled in part by recent independent scientific studies and also bowing to mounting concern from the public and consumer groups, the agency announced that it would tap $30m in federal stimulus funds to study the chemical’s potential effects on the human body.

Though it is not clear how economically stimulating the study will be, its results are anxiously awaited in industry and consumer circles. The report, due late in 2011, is being done in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health.

“BPA has not been found or been proven to harm either children or adults, but because children … in the very early stages of development are exposed to BPA, the data that we’re getting deserves a much closer look,” Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Bill Corr said earlier this year.

What is clear, however, is that unlike the case with plastic, there are no economically viable alternatives to the chemical in epoxy resins right now.

“If it’s in baby bottles, then I can imagine it’s in a lot of other things,” said Sprague, who has a history of premature deliveries, but is due to give birth to a boy in September. “Everybody gets breast cancer now. It’s scary. Is it because of BPA? I don’t know.”

BPA versus DNA
One scientist helping to lead the charge against BPA is Yale University physician, professor and researcher Hugh Taylor. His research has shown that the chemical alters the way genes react to estrogen, and could open the door for infants in utero to develop cancer much later in life.

“I tell my pregnant patients to avoid products containing it,” he said. “Even a fleeting exposure in pregnancy can cause lasting damage.”

The studies by Taylor are certainly eye-opening. They have shown that the chemical alters the way DNA operates, a process known as an epigenetic change.

On each strand of DNA a group of carbon molecules binds to receptors that help turn genes on or off. In the presence of BPA, though, many of those carbon molecules can be removed from DNA, and with them the switch.

Think of the carbon groups as a kind of lock, and the DNA receptors as a gate. When the lock is removed, the gate can swing open, greatly increasing the risk for estrogen to flow through later in life, interact with DNA and cause cancer.

“It has permanent, lasting effects,” said Taylor, donning a white coat in his New Haven, Connecticut, lab surrounded by beakers, microscopes, pipettes and other tools of the scientist’s trade. “The adult exposure is concerning, but I think the fetal exposure is worse.”

To study the way BPA may affect children in utero, Taylor injected pregnant mice with high doses of the chemical five days into their 21-day gestation cycle. He found that the mice exposed to BPA in the womb lacked the “gate” on their DNA receptors and were more susceptible to estrogen for the rest of their lives.

Since many foods contain natural estrogen – soy, for instance – Taylor believes his studies suggest complications could arise down the road simply from eating basic foods, never mind estrogen supplements that many women take as they enter menopause. “In the mouse models, they’re more prone to cancer,” Taylor said.

As a gynecologist, Taylor studied the effects primarily on female mice. The long-term impact of increased BPA on DNA receptors in males, he said, remains unknown. His research is also limited because he can’t test BPA on unaffected humans. “We all have it in our bodies, so there’s no way to test a population without it,” he said. “You’ll never have the perfect experiment in humans to prove this.”

Right now Taylor is studying just how BPA removes the carbon groups from DNA – in effect the specific process that removes the “lock” – and hopes this will shed further light on how the chemical interacts with the body.

He acknowledges BPA’s role in food safety but says people should be made aware of the potential danger. “We always balance the risk with the benefits in our lives,” he said. “There’s a price we pay for modern society and convenience.”

Frederick vom Saal, a professor at the University of Missouri who is studying BPA independently from Taylor, is far less diplomatic. Known as an aggressive crusader against the chemical, he said that if BPA were treated as a drug, “it would have been pulled immediately” by regulators.

A eureka moment
Inside canned food, the thin layer of epoxy resin sits between the food and metal can, helping to keep the two from interacting and preventing rust.

The resin is sprayed into the can and dries almost instantly. Thousands of companies, such as Campbell Soup Co and Coca-Cola, use it to line their cans. Without it, food would perish far faster. Cans lacking the chemical would explode on store shelves when contents reacted with the metal.

First synthesised in 1891, BPA is a commercial hardener, making it great to use in a wide variety of applications, ranging from plastic canoes to headlights to cash register receipts. As a key building block for epoxy resin, it acts as part of the compound’s polymer base, and was first used in the 1940s in canned foods.

A breakthrough product in its day, it has also been enduring. “There’s just something about it,” said Steve Russell, the head of the plastics division for the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group. “When they figured it out, it was one of those ‘eureka’ moments.”

Because BPA has been presumed to be safe without question for so long, very little research has been undertaken to find commercially viable substitutes in canned goods. “At the moment, there is no single epoxy resin which provides the same degree of food safety, shelf stability and cost-effectiveness for maintaining the shelf life of fruits and vegetables,” said Russell.

That was not the case with plastic bottles. In that industry, replacements have been much easier to come by. Alternatives to plastic with BPA include polyethylene, most commonly used to make shopping bags, and polypropylene, which makes water bottles squeezable.

To be sure, non-BPA-based resins exist, but they are much more expensive. That’s a challenge for an industry that is sensitive about price differences to the fraction of a penny.

Michigan-based Eden Foods, for example, markets beans and rice in BPA-free cans made by Ball Corp, but they cost 14 percent more than traditional ones. With the can itself representing one of the largest costs for food makers, switching to an alternative likely would boost prices and hurt consumers – especially the legions of coupon-clippers struggling to make ends meet.

Ball uses an enamel mix comprised of natural resins from pine and balsam fir trees, a mix that was used before BPA became popular more than 50 years ago. “When you’re talking about half the cost of a can of food being just the can itself, in an extremely hyper-competitive environment, it’s a big deal,” said Michael Potter, president of Eden Foods.

Nevertheless, the company has been able to survive due to growing interest from natural food devotees, he said. Eden still markets tomato products in cans containing BPA, noting that the FDA hasn’t signed off on any other types of can linings for acidic foods. But Potter says he is working with Ball on a replacement that he hopes will hit shelves in the next few years.

Other alternatives are being developed. Earlier this year Michael Jaffe, a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, received a patent for a corn sugar-based resin that mimics BPA’s structure but doesn’t have the harmful side effects.

Still, the resin is years away from commercial use, and the price of switching to it remain unknown. “The final cost will clearly be linked to volume,” Jaffe said. “But I see no reason why these resins can’t be competitive with BPA.”

Back at the University of Rochester, Swan and her colleagues are studying just how much BPA is absorbed by the body depending on how much canned food is eaten. Their report is due out later this year.

Of mice and metabolisation
For the time being, the chemical industry is not just sticking with BPA. It is also warning consumers to be wary of anything that claims to be an acceptable substitute but may not have undergone rigorous testing.

“We’re all parents, and we can all understand that everybody wants to do the best for their kids,” the ACC’s Russell said. “But in doing so we need to understand that we’re doing it not because the government agencies around the world say they’re not safe, you’re doing so because in some places, some people want to be extra safe. It comes down to the degree of uncertainty that you’re comfortable with.”

Part of the concern many in the chemical industry have with studies like Taylor’s is that they tend to use very large doses of BPA. Taylor injected his mice with five milligrams of the chemical – far more than anyone would be exposed to eating from just one can.

The chemical industry maintains that BPA metabolises very quickly in the body and is excreted before it can even interact with cells. “The levels of chemical that you would be exposed to from using products containing BPA, including epoxy lining in food containers, is so small that all these government agencies have looked at it and have said, ‘Yeah, even if all these horrible things that BPA is said to cause were true, the exposure levels are so small that we’re not convinced there’s an actual risk here,” Russell said. “That’s why they continue to allow them to be used.”

For Yale’s Taylor, any amount of a harmful chemical is too much for some. “We can argue over what is a safe dose, but if I’m pregnant I’m going to avoid it,” he said. “The adult exposure is concerning, but I think the fetal exposure is worse.”

Given this chasm, all eyes are on the FDA. The agency has long insisted that the chemical is safe, so it did not go unnoticed when it said it would use funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to study what BPA does to the human body. “We need to know more,” Deputy FDA Commissioner Dr. Josh Sharfstein told reporters earlier this year.

Adding to the confusion, his counterpart across the northern border disagrees. Health Canada, that country’s top health regulator, bans BPA in plastic baby bottles, but earlier this month the agency said that the levels of BPA levels in canned food “are not considered to represent a human health concern.”

Leading companies and industry organisations reference both the FDA and Health Canada’s current stance on BPA in plastic resin, saying they stand behind findings from those and other agencies that the chemical is safe. “We welcome the FDA’s current research into BPA,” said Scott Openshaw of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. “We rely on the proper regulatory authorities to determine if something like this is unsafe.”

The North American Metal Packaging Alliance, a trade group for canned food and beverage makers, says BPA provides “real, important and measurable health benefits.” “A lot of younger people today don’t even understand what a bulging can is, but most of our grandparents understand that a bulging can is a contaminated can,” said John Rost, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is chairman of the alliance. “Through the use of epoxy coatings in metal packaging, there has not been a food-borne illness case in more than 33 years.”

Nevertheless, the backlash against BPA has reached corporate America. In April, Coca-Cola shareholders rejected a proposal to force the company to issue a report on potential alternatives to BPA and how the chemical could affect market share. Executives insisted that the report would not offer any “additional or useful information.”

A person weighing 135 pounds (61 kg) would need to ingest more than 14,800 12-ounce cans of a beverage in one day to approach the FDA’s acceptable daily limit for BPA consumption, Coca-Cola said.

For BPA manufacturers, including Dow Chemical and Hexion Specialty Chemicals, the chemical is not a large revenue base. If it were banned in food applications tomorrow, both companies and their peers would likely move forward without so much as a hiccup.

According to SRI Consulting, about 4.1 million tons of plastic resin were used globally in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available. The industry has the capacity to produce about 4.6 million tons, though, and Western Europe actually uses more than the US.

Soup’s on
Back at Yolande Sprague’s house in Dover, New Hampshire, her five-year-old son, Eddie, is looking through the cupboards for a snack.

His parents don’t want to freak out about BPA; they know that statistically it’s saved lives by reducing deaths from food poisoning. Indeed, Eddie’s chance of hitting his 6th birthday is dramatically higher because he was born in 2004 rather than 1804, when children routinely died of food-related illnesses.

Even so, many parents remain concerned. Just what is an acceptable amount of BPA to ingest? Should we be knowingly ingesting a potential carcinogen into our bodies, even at minuscule levels? Why aren’t there better, cheaper alternatives?

For now, families like Sprague’s weigh their options every day on canned food, though experts like Yale’s Taylor point out that if the end result is more people eat fresh fruits and vegetables, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

“I don’t use canned foods on a daily basis,” said Sprague, 26. “But if I did, then I would cut back.”

The wind blows softly through Sprague’s screened sliding door, and papers flutter off her fridge. Her son, Eddie, runs to the cupboard, grabs a can and turns to his mother.

“Mum,” he asks. “What kind of soup is this?”