Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/550331
66 tobaccoasia food, feedstock for animals, and a product for export. As a matter of fact, some food shortages are already attributed to food crops being used as bio- fuel. This would literally mean that tobacco would help feed the hungry. After all, tobacco is plentiful and boasts multiple harvests a year. Nearly seven million tons are produced throughout the world every year, according to the US Census Bureau. Gardening and agriculture Another potential use is as a natural pesticide, due to tobacco's nicotine content. For centuries, gar- deners have used home-made mixtures of tobacco and water as a natural pesticide. In fact, tobacco is a great insect repellent for any garden. By simply soaking as little as a cigarette amount of tobacco in a quart of water and allowing it to soak overnight, the nicotine released in the water will create an all- purpose insect repellent. Scientists say that a "green" pesticide indus- try built around tobacco could mean additional income for farmers and a new environmentally- friendly pest-control agent. A promising way to convert tobacco leaves into pesticides involves heating tobacco leaves to about 900 degrees Fahr- enheit in a vacuum to produce an unrefined sub- stance called bio-oil. Scientists tested tobacco bio- oil against a wide variety of insect pests, including 11 different fungi, four bacteria, and the Colorado potato beetle. The oil killed all of the beetles and blocked the growth of two types of bacteria and one fungus. Aphids, flea beetles, slugs, snails, and thrips are a real nuisance if allowed to thrive on garden plants, but a mixture of powdered garlic, compost, and tobacco mixed into the soil around the base of your infested plants will rid your gar- den of these pests. The Florida-based Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (Echo) has developed a spe- cial tobacco spray. The spray is prepared by tak- ing 250 grams of dried tobacco leaves, stems, or dust, and boiling them in four liters of water for 20 minutes. After the solution cools, it is then filtered through layered cotton cloth, four more liters of water and 50 grams of bar soap are also added. Such solution can be poured into sorghum and corn funnels to kill stalk borer, poured as a soil drench around plants to kill cutworms, or utilized to spray beans to prevent rust disease and also to control aphids, beetles, cabbage worms, caterpil- lars, grain weevils, leaf miners, mites, stem borers and thrips. As you can see, tobacco has a future that is much brighter than it might seem at first glance. It is certainly not the evil incarnated that it's been made out to be in the mainstream media. Let's hope we see some of these amazing scientific ad- vances work for the benefit of everyone. of the key flavor ingredient called cembranoids, which shows promise as an anti-cancer agent. It was very exciting to discover the anti-cancer ac- tivities." The so-called cembranoids are found in the waxy substance on fresh tobacco leaves and show potential for controlling metastatic breast and prostate cancers. The tobacco plant produces them as a chemical defense to protect itself against insects and harmful microbial infections. As Karen Briski, head of the department of basic pharmaceutical sciences said at the time: "This is a remarkable discovery. It demonstrates that there is a helpful, healthy application for to- bacco." Aviation Another rather unlikely but perfectly legitimate use of tobacco is as a source of biofuel. Mention bio- fuels and most people think of corn ethanol. But tobacco? Nevertheless, Boeing recently announced a collaboration with South African Airlines (SAA) to develop a renewable jet fuel made out of a new, energy-rich tobacco plant produced in South Af- rica. This new tobacco hybrid, known as Solaris, is virtually nicotine-free and has a high seed yield. It is currently produced by a company called SkyNRG, which promises to increase production to meet the company's needs. Currently, the biofuel will only be made from the seed, but new manufacturing pro- cesses are expected to allow the use of the entire plant as biofuel in the future. Boeing and SAA are not alone in this – to- bacco's potential as a viable biofuel source has attracted attention of researchers from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Na- tional Laboratory, who are exploring ways to pro- duce gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from tobacco leaf. Their goal is to design tobacco plants that use energy from sunlight in order to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves. The leaves would then be crushed, and the fuel extracted and separated. The scientists estimate that about 1000 acres of tobacco could yield more than one mil- lion gallons of fuel. The potential benefits of this development are hard to overestimate. They include the scientific progress in finding a new crop-source for biofuel, the economic boost of providing farmers a new market for a product that has seen declining de- mand for years, and the social value of encourag- ing tobacco growers to sell more of their crop for something other than smoking products, which might potentially reduce the incidence of emphy- sema and other respiratory illnesses. Another great advantage is the fact that un- like corn and sorghum, which are also success- fully used as fuel products, tobacco has no role in the food chain. Corn, for example, has a mul- titude of uses vital to the agriculture industry, as