May 31, 2010
Virus Ravages Cassava Plants in Africa
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
MUKONO, Uganda — Lynet Nalugo dug a cassava tuber out of her field and sliced it open.
Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast.
“Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.
The plant was what she called a “2961,” meaning it was Variant No. 2961, the only local strain bred to resist cassava mosaic virus, a disease that caused a major African famine in the 1920s.
But this was not mosaic disease, which only stunts the plants. Her field had been attacked by a new and more damaging virus named brown streak, for the marks it leaves on stems.
That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.
Although it has been seen on coastal farms for 70 years, a mutant version emerged in Africa’s interior in 2004, “and there has been explosive, pandemic-style spread since then,” said Claude M. Fauquet, director of cassava research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “The speed is just unprecedented, and the farmers are really desperate.”
Two years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened cassava experts and realized that brown streak “was alarming quite a few people,” said Lawrence Kent, an agriculture program officer at the foundation. It has given $27 million in grants to aid agencies and plant scientists fighting the disease.
The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories. Under many names, including manioc, tapioca and yuca, it is eaten by 800 million people in Africa, South America and Asia.
The danger has been likened to that of Phytophthora infestans, the blight that struck European potatoes in the 1840s, setting off a famine that killed perhaps a million people in Ireland and forced even more to emigrate.
That event changed the history of all English-speaking countries.
Compared with amber waves of grain or the blond tresses of a field of ripe corn, cassava is an inglorious workhorse of a crop, a few spindly red stems sprouting from a clutch of brown tubers. It is filling but not very nutritious; it even contains trace amounts of cyanide, which must be removed by grinding and fermenting.
But subsistence farmers depend on it because it’s “very drought-tolerant and very bad-management-tolerant,” said Edward Charles, a team leader for the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative, a six-country consortium based in Kenya and supported by the Gates Foundation. For example, he said, even when farmers are too weak from malaria to weed, their crops survive.
Also, the tubers can be left underground for up to three years, so if drought kills a corn or bean crop, the farmer’s family can still fend off starvation. But the plant falls prey to more than 20 pests and diseases.
Dr. Fauquet fears brown streak will cross the Congo Basin to Nigeria, the world’s biggest grower, because farmers sell cuttings to one another and border controls are nonexistent or can be evaded with bribes.
He is optimistic it will not cross the ocean into Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia or China because there is no world trade in the cuttings and few direct flights to Asia or South America. (Whiteflies, which are thought to spread the virus, have been known to stow aboard planes.)
However, he noted, mosaic virus did spread to India from Africa somehow. And Dai Peters, the Cassava Initiative’s director, noted that a mealybug that damages Brazilian cassavas has leapfrogged the globe to infect Thai fields, too.
Even if the brown streak virus is contained in Africa, Dr. Fauquet said, donors may eventually be forced to spend billions of dollars on food aid to prevent starving populations from going on the move, which could set off ethnic fighting.
Donations by the Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development and a foundation run by Monsanto, the crop technology company, have totaled about $50 million thus far, but compared with the threat, “that’s a droplet in the ocean,” Dr. Fauquet said.
The largest Gates grant, $22 million, went to Dr. Peters’s initiative, which is overseen by Catholic Relief Services, an American charity. Working with the national agricultural laboratories of six countries, it combines American computer technology, African rural self-help initiatives and research started a century ago by British colonialists.
Right now, there is no cassava strain in Africa immune to brown streak, so the initiative is essentially buying time, teaching farmers to recognize diseased crops, asking them to burn them and offering them clean cuttings so they can get one or two harvests before the virus strikes again.
They are hoping for a lucky break, like the success they are finally having against banana wilt, another virus that attacked a different East African staple food.
In that case, the solution was relatively simple, said Chris A. Omongo, an entomologist at the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Namulonge, Uganda.
Since bees and dirt spread the virus, farmers were taught to nip the purple male flower buds off each stalk and to clean their tools and boots before entering their banana patches.
(The virus was jokingly called “banana AIDS,” because it, too, spread along the Uganda-Tanzania highways and rivers. Banana beer was shipped in jerry cans with the fat purple flowers used as stoppers.)
Some wild and some foreign cassava strains do appear resistant to brown streak, Dr. Fauquet said, but they lack the taste and consistency that Africans like. (Some cassava strains are grown just for flour, for industrial paste or for the food enhancer MSG.)
Dr. Fauquet’s lab is trying to splice genes from them into African varieties. Because of the extensive safety testing required for new plants produced that way, the process will take at least five years, he estimated.
Here in Uganda, because there are so few government agricultural agents, the Cassava Initiative is building its own parallel network. Its agents have no power to destroy a crop or seize a truckful of diseased cuttings. But they do have rugged minicomputers with software to help them teach farmers to recognize the disease. They can also pinpoint a suspect field’s GPS location, take photographs and send them from any Internet cafe.
To help farmers work together, the initiative also helps them form savings clubs, giving everyone a steel cash box and guidance.
Members put in a few dollars each week, and offer loans of $50 or $100 for money-generating projects like buying a flock of hens or brick-making molds. At year’s end, they divide the profit, which can be hefty since the interest rate is 120 percent.
Mrs. Nalugo keeps the cash box for her local savings club, and she may have to borrow from it this year. If her cassava crop had been healthy, she estimated, she could have sold it for $500.
Instead, she said, “the loss is pushing us back — we will have to buy food.”
However, she is a smart farmer. She had learned the symptoms of brown streak from Elijah Kajubi, the initiative’s local agent.
When her plants were only knee-high, she said, “I became suspicious, so I planted beans, too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/scien ... ?th&emc=th
WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
The poor die because they cannot afford to buy grain (which they themselves may or may not have grown) at the prices that meat growers are prepared to pay; and the rich die because of over-consumption. [More]
-- Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan
******
United Nations identify meat eaters as warming the planet
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceJune 2, 2010 1:11 PM
With global population expected to increase 50 per cent to as many 10 billion people by 2050, the panel says changes in diet will be needed to ensure there is enough to eat.
Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann/Canwest News Service, NP
Humanity needs to radically alter what it eats, according to an expert panel advising the United Nations on the planet's environmental challenges.
Cattle and other animals are fed more than half the world's crops, an appetite the panel says needs to be curbed to provide more food for people and reduce agriculture's environmental impact.
"A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animals products," says the report to be released Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program.
The panel was asked to identify activities associated with the largest environmental pressures and impacts in the world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes and rising consumption.
It identified agriculture as a priority area in need of "transformational change," along with fossil fuel use -- which is helping drive climate change -- and production and use of materials such as iron, steel, aluminum and plastics, which also has a large environmental footprint.
Agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of global freshwater consumption and 38 per cent of total land use, and is a major source of greenhouse gases, phosphorus and nitrogen pollution.
With global population expected to increase 50 per cent to as many 10 billion people by 2050, the panel says changes in diet will be needed to ensure there is enough to eat.
Compounding the situation is increasing affluence, since richer people tend to consume more fossil fuels and eat more animal products.
"In the case of food, rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products -- livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilizers and pesticides linked with that crop production in the first place," German scientist Ernst von Weizsaecker, co-chair of the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management said.
Canadian panel member Yvan Hardy, former chief scientist at Natural Resources Canada, said in a telephone interview from Brussels Tuesday that there is plenty of potential for "disaster" on the horizon.
"We have to be very prudent and aware of what is going on," said Hardy, pointing to challenges associated with growing population and climate change.
"Basically I think the world . . . has lost sight of what it takes to support our standard of living," said Hardy. "What we can extract from the earth, in terms of both natural resources and nutrients, is limited."
http://www.canada.com/story_print.html? ... 4&sponsor=
-- Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan
******
United Nations identify meat eaters as warming the planet
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceJune 2, 2010 1:11 PM
With global population expected to increase 50 per cent to as many 10 billion people by 2050, the panel says changes in diet will be needed to ensure there is enough to eat.
Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann/Canwest News Service, NP
Humanity needs to radically alter what it eats, according to an expert panel advising the United Nations on the planet's environmental challenges.
Cattle and other animals are fed more than half the world's crops, an appetite the panel says needs to be curbed to provide more food for people and reduce agriculture's environmental impact.
"A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animals products," says the report to be released Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program.
The panel was asked to identify activities associated with the largest environmental pressures and impacts in the world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes and rising consumption.
It identified agriculture as a priority area in need of "transformational change," along with fossil fuel use -- which is helping drive climate change -- and production and use of materials such as iron, steel, aluminum and plastics, which also has a large environmental footprint.
Agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of global freshwater consumption and 38 per cent of total land use, and is a major source of greenhouse gases, phosphorus and nitrogen pollution.
With global population expected to increase 50 per cent to as many 10 billion people by 2050, the panel says changes in diet will be needed to ensure there is enough to eat.
Compounding the situation is increasing affluence, since richer people tend to consume more fossil fuels and eat more animal products.
"In the case of food, rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products -- livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilizers and pesticides linked with that crop production in the first place," German scientist Ernst von Weizsaecker, co-chair of the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management said.
Canadian panel member Yvan Hardy, former chief scientist at Natural Resources Canada, said in a telephone interview from Brussels Tuesday that there is plenty of potential for "disaster" on the horizon.
"We have to be very prudent and aware of what is going on," said Hardy, pointing to challenges associated with growing population and climate change.
"Basically I think the world . . . has lost sight of what it takes to support our standard of living," said Hardy. "What we can extract from the earth, in terms of both natural resources and nutrients, is limited."
http://www.canada.com/story_print.html? ... 4&sponsor=
Last edited by kmaherali on Wed Jun 02, 2010 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
August 5, 2010
Russia, Crippled by Drought, Bans Grain Exports
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday banned all exports of grain after millions of acres of Russian wheat withered in a severe drought, driving up prices around the world and pushing them to their highest level in two years in the United States.
The move was the latest of several abrupt interventions in the Russian economy by Mr. Putin, who called the ban necessary to curb rising food prices in the country. Russia is suffering from the worst heat wave since record-keeping began here more than 130 years ago.
“We need to prevent a rise in domestic food prices, we need to preserve the number of cattle and build up reserves for next year,” Mr. Putin said in a meeting broadcast on television. “As the saying goes, reserves don’t make your pocket heavy.”
During his years as president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has never hesitated to marshal the power of the state to protect Russian economic interests, and this decision showed that this has remained his prerogative even after he stepped down as president.
Mr. Putin has also proved adept at deflecting criticism of the government with grand gestures, and the export ban was widely seen as one of a series of populist moves by Mr. Putin to address rising resentment over the calamitous heat wave and the fires it has spawned.
Pressure was also brought to bear by multinational grain trading companies, which have been lobbying for the ban as a way to escape futures contracts drawn up before the drought, when prices were far lower. A Russian subsidiary of Glencore, the Swiss-based commodities trading company that has close ties to the Russian government, pressed hard as the scope of the drought’s devastation became clear.
Wheat prices have soared by about 90 percent since June because of the drought in Russia and parts of the European Union, as well as floods in Canada, and the ban pushed prices even higher. Exports from Ukraine, another major exporter, are down sharply this year.
Russia, the largest grain-exporting nation before World War I, has largely recovered from failed Soviet agricultural policies, lifted by rising global food prices and economic reforms that encouraged private farmers and companies to once again till the country’s expansive and fertile croplands. Before this year’s drought, yields had risen steadily, and Russian grain exports totaled 21.4 million metric tons last year, about 17 percent of the global grain trade.
But on Thursday, rail cars heaped with fresh grain came to a halt around Russia, stopped in midjourney from the country’s fields to the main exporting ports on the Black Sea. The order covered a variety of grains, including barley and corn, but will have its greatest impact on wheat exports.
Mr. Putin said that the government might extend the ban if the harvest yields even less than the current grim forecasts. The projected yield is about 70 million metric tons of grain, according to the Russian Grain Union, a lobbying group for farmers, about equal to domestic needs and down sharply from last year’s total of 97 million metric tons.
The group was sharply critical of Mr. Putin’s decision. “First of all, you can congratulate American farmers, who are going to take the niche that Russian farmers are leaving” in global markets because of the ban, said Anton V. Shaparin, a spokesman for the group. He added that Russia’s reserves could cover the shortages from this year.
Owing to last year’s bumper crop, Russia currently holds about 24 million metric tons in grain elevators, the group said.
In Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer and a major customer of Russia, officials said only that they hoped current contracts would be honored.
The abrupt ban — just this week, a deputy agricultural minister had said no such measure would be taken — recalled other decisive actions by Mr. Putin. Last summer, he canceled Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization, saying the country would apply only as a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Mr. Putin twice ordered natural gas shutoffs to Europe amid disputes with Ukraine ostensibly over pricing.
The Russian agro-business sector, which has just been emerging here from the ashes of the failed Soviet collective farm system, was also left pondering its future.
Russia, blessed with the greatest reserve of fertile but fallow land in the world, is thought by many experts to have the greatest potential of any country to meet mounting demand for food from a growing global population.
Michel Orloff, the founder of Black Earth Farming, one of the new corporate farming operations that have raised yields by consolidating and reforming collective farms, said Mr. Putin’s ban made sense from the perspective of curbing domestic food prices but would cost companies like his.
“We are on the verge of national need,” Mr. Orloff said. “Of course, the freer the market, the better. But his job is not only to take care of the farmers of this country, but the citizens of this country.”
Kingsmill Bond, chief analyst at Troika investment bank in Moscow, which has studied the revolution in Russian farming, said the ban would damage shares in corporate farming operations like Black Earth, Razgulay and Cherkizov.
Still, he said, “grain is an emotive issue; you want to make sure you have sufficient supplies.”
Russia, Crippled by Drought, Bans Grain Exports
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday banned all exports of grain after millions of acres of Russian wheat withered in a severe drought, driving up prices around the world and pushing them to their highest level in two years in the United States.
The move was the latest of several abrupt interventions in the Russian economy by Mr. Putin, who called the ban necessary to curb rising food prices in the country. Russia is suffering from the worst heat wave since record-keeping began here more than 130 years ago.
“We need to prevent a rise in domestic food prices, we need to preserve the number of cattle and build up reserves for next year,” Mr. Putin said in a meeting broadcast on television. “As the saying goes, reserves don’t make your pocket heavy.”
During his years as president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has never hesitated to marshal the power of the state to protect Russian economic interests, and this decision showed that this has remained his prerogative even after he stepped down as president.
Mr. Putin has also proved adept at deflecting criticism of the government with grand gestures, and the export ban was widely seen as one of a series of populist moves by Mr. Putin to address rising resentment over the calamitous heat wave and the fires it has spawned.
Pressure was also brought to bear by multinational grain trading companies, which have been lobbying for the ban as a way to escape futures contracts drawn up before the drought, when prices were far lower. A Russian subsidiary of Glencore, the Swiss-based commodities trading company that has close ties to the Russian government, pressed hard as the scope of the drought’s devastation became clear.
Wheat prices have soared by about 90 percent since June because of the drought in Russia and parts of the European Union, as well as floods in Canada, and the ban pushed prices even higher. Exports from Ukraine, another major exporter, are down sharply this year.
Russia, the largest grain-exporting nation before World War I, has largely recovered from failed Soviet agricultural policies, lifted by rising global food prices and economic reforms that encouraged private farmers and companies to once again till the country’s expansive and fertile croplands. Before this year’s drought, yields had risen steadily, and Russian grain exports totaled 21.4 million metric tons last year, about 17 percent of the global grain trade.
But on Thursday, rail cars heaped with fresh grain came to a halt around Russia, stopped in midjourney from the country’s fields to the main exporting ports on the Black Sea. The order covered a variety of grains, including barley and corn, but will have its greatest impact on wheat exports.
Mr. Putin said that the government might extend the ban if the harvest yields even less than the current grim forecasts. The projected yield is about 70 million metric tons of grain, according to the Russian Grain Union, a lobbying group for farmers, about equal to domestic needs and down sharply from last year’s total of 97 million metric tons.
The group was sharply critical of Mr. Putin’s decision. “First of all, you can congratulate American farmers, who are going to take the niche that Russian farmers are leaving” in global markets because of the ban, said Anton V. Shaparin, a spokesman for the group. He added that Russia’s reserves could cover the shortages from this year.
Owing to last year’s bumper crop, Russia currently holds about 24 million metric tons in grain elevators, the group said.
In Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer and a major customer of Russia, officials said only that they hoped current contracts would be honored.
The abrupt ban — just this week, a deputy agricultural minister had said no such measure would be taken — recalled other decisive actions by Mr. Putin. Last summer, he canceled Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization, saying the country would apply only as a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Mr. Putin twice ordered natural gas shutoffs to Europe amid disputes with Ukraine ostensibly over pricing.
The Russian agro-business sector, which has just been emerging here from the ashes of the failed Soviet collective farm system, was also left pondering its future.
Russia, blessed with the greatest reserve of fertile but fallow land in the world, is thought by many experts to have the greatest potential of any country to meet mounting demand for food from a growing global population.
Michel Orloff, the founder of Black Earth Farming, one of the new corporate farming operations that have raised yields by consolidating and reforming collective farms, said Mr. Putin’s ban made sense from the perspective of curbing domestic food prices but would cost companies like his.
“We are on the verge of national need,” Mr. Orloff said. “Of course, the freer the market, the better. But his job is not only to take care of the farmers of this country, but the citizens of this country.”
Kingsmill Bond, chief analyst at Troika investment bank in Moscow, which has studied the revolution in Russian farming, said the ban would damage shares in corporate farming operations like Black Earth, Razgulay and Cherkizov.
Still, he said, “grain is an emotive issue; you want to make sure you have sufficient supplies.”
Scientists unravel wheat genetic code
Breakthrough could improve food security
Agence France-Presse; Winnipeg Free PressAugust 28, 2010
The cracking of wheat's genome -- a breakthrough announced by scientists Friday -- will speed up the creation of hardier and higher-yielding cereal crops and improve global food security, Canadian and international researchers are predicting.
British researchers said Friday they had unravelled 95 per cent of the genetic code for a benchmark variety of wheat known as Chinese Spring line 42. The work has been made available online to help spur research into improving wheat yields and strengthening resilience to disease, water stress and insects.
"Recent short-term price spikes in the wheat markets have shown how vulnerable our food system is to shocks and potential shortages," said Doug Kell, head of Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, a public-sector organization that backed the work.
"The best way to support our food security is by using modern research strategies to understand how we can deliver sustainable increases in crop yields, especially in the face of climate change."
The development could trigger a global race by the best scientific minds to apply the new genetic information. The farmers of countries that employ the genome information first would then have a competitive advantage.
That could put pressure on Canada to invest in its premium wheats, such as Canada Western Red Spring, to stay ahead of other countries.
Many crops with much smaller genomes have had their DNA sequenced for some time -- rice in 2005, corn in 2009, and soybeans earlier this year.
Wheat is so complicated partly because it is the hybridization of three ancestral strains of wheat.
"That's been one of the challenges. The genome is so huge," said Anita Brule-Babel, plant geneticist at the University of Manitoba.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
Breakthrough could improve food security
Agence France-Presse; Winnipeg Free PressAugust 28, 2010
The cracking of wheat's genome -- a breakthrough announced by scientists Friday -- will speed up the creation of hardier and higher-yielding cereal crops and improve global food security, Canadian and international researchers are predicting.
British researchers said Friday they had unravelled 95 per cent of the genetic code for a benchmark variety of wheat known as Chinese Spring line 42. The work has been made available online to help spur research into improving wheat yields and strengthening resilience to disease, water stress and insects.
"Recent short-term price spikes in the wheat markets have shown how vulnerable our food system is to shocks and potential shortages," said Doug Kell, head of Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, a public-sector organization that backed the work.
"The best way to support our food security is by using modern research strategies to understand how we can deliver sustainable increases in crop yields, especially in the face of climate change."
The development could trigger a global race by the best scientific minds to apply the new genetic information. The farmers of countries that employ the genome information first would then have a competitive advantage.
That could put pressure on Canada to invest in its premium wheats, such as Canada Western Red Spring, to stay ahead of other countries.
Many crops with much smaller genomes have had their DNA sequenced for some time -- rice in 2005, corn in 2009, and soybeans earlier this year.
Wheat is so complicated partly because it is the hybridization of three ancestral strains of wheat.
"That's been one of the challenges. The genome is so huge," said Anita Brule-Babel, plant geneticist at the University of Manitoba.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 3, 2010
U.N. Raises Concerns as Global Food Prices Jump
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding.
Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.
“You are dealing with an unstable situation,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
“People still remember what happened a few years ago, so it is a combination of psychology and the expectation that worse may come,” he added. “There are critical months ahead.”
The F.A.O. has called a special session of grain experts from around the world on Sept. 24 to address the supply question. Given that the fields stretching out from the Black Sea have been the main source of a huge leap in wheat trade over the past decade, the fluctuating weather patterns and unstable harvests there will have to be addressed, he said.
It is an issue not limited to Russia alone. Harvest forecasts in Germany and Canada are clouded by wet weather and flooding, while crops in Argentina will suffer from drought, as could Australia’s, according to agricultural experts. The bump in prices because of the uncertainty about future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will face higher bread prices in the coming months.
Food prices are still some 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassian said, when a tripling in the price of rice among other staples led to food riots in about a dozen countries and helped topple at least one government.
The wheat crop this year globally is also the third highest on record, according to the F.A.O., but the sudden supply interruptions make the markets jittery. In June, Russia was predicting a loss of just a few million metric tons due to hot weather, but by August it announced it would lose about one-fifth of its crop. Wheat prices more than doubled in that period.
“There are reasons to be watching this and to be concerned because regionally there will be supply challenges,” said Justin P. Gilpin, the head of the Kansas Wheat Commission. “There is uncertainty in the marketplace.”
A decade ago, the area around the Black Sea — mainly Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — used to supply just about 4 percent of the wheat traded internationally. But most of the growth in demand globally has been supplied from there, and the region now produces about 30 percent of the wheat traded internationally, said Mr. Abbassian. This is the first time a supply crisis has originated from that area, he noted.
In early August, Russia announced an export ban that it would review at the end of the year, but Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced Thursday that the ban on grain exports would extend into 2011. The price of wheat jumped again, and that has had a spillover effect into other grains like corn and soybeans. The forecast for the global rice harvest has also dropped, although it is still expected to be higher than in 2009 and should be a record, the F.A.O. said.
“If you look at the numbers globally, the Americans, the Europeans and the Australians can make up the supply,” Mr. Abbassian said of the wheat harvest, playing down the chances of repeating the 2008 crisis. “There is no reason for this hype, but once the psychological thing sets in it is hard to change that perception, especially if Russia keeps sending bad news.”
After two days of rioting set off by price increases for bread and utilities like electricity and water, the streets in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, were largely calm on Friday. But 10 people had been killed and 300 injured, Health Minister Ivo Garrido told a news conference, local news agencies reported. Price increases have been much sharper in Mozambique than in most of the world because the government kept prices artificially low before elections last year, some analysts said.
As with any commodity, questions of wheat shortages spur speculation and hoarding, and experts suggest both are at play in the current market. They believe more money is washing through the commodity market for wheat because with interest rates so low and the stock market so volatile, investors are putting their money in the Chicago Board of Trade.
But the world also has to come to grips with changing weather patterns due to climate change, argued Prof. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, an expert in international agriculture at Cornell University.
“We are going to have much bigger fluctuations in weather and therefore the food supply than we had in the past, so we are going to have to learn how to cope with fluctuating food prices,” Professor Pinstrup-Anderson said.
Barry Bearak contributed reporting from Johannesburg.
September 3, 2010
U.N. Raises Concerns as Global Food Prices Jump
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding.
Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.
“You are dealing with an unstable situation,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
“People still remember what happened a few years ago, so it is a combination of psychology and the expectation that worse may come,” he added. “There are critical months ahead.”
The F.A.O. has called a special session of grain experts from around the world on Sept. 24 to address the supply question. Given that the fields stretching out from the Black Sea have been the main source of a huge leap in wheat trade over the past decade, the fluctuating weather patterns and unstable harvests there will have to be addressed, he said.
It is an issue not limited to Russia alone. Harvest forecasts in Germany and Canada are clouded by wet weather and flooding, while crops in Argentina will suffer from drought, as could Australia’s, according to agricultural experts. The bump in prices because of the uncertainty about future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will face higher bread prices in the coming months.
Food prices are still some 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassian said, when a tripling in the price of rice among other staples led to food riots in about a dozen countries and helped topple at least one government.
The wheat crop this year globally is also the third highest on record, according to the F.A.O., but the sudden supply interruptions make the markets jittery. In June, Russia was predicting a loss of just a few million metric tons due to hot weather, but by August it announced it would lose about one-fifth of its crop. Wheat prices more than doubled in that period.
“There are reasons to be watching this and to be concerned because regionally there will be supply challenges,” said Justin P. Gilpin, the head of the Kansas Wheat Commission. “There is uncertainty in the marketplace.”
A decade ago, the area around the Black Sea — mainly Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — used to supply just about 4 percent of the wheat traded internationally. But most of the growth in demand globally has been supplied from there, and the region now produces about 30 percent of the wheat traded internationally, said Mr. Abbassian. This is the first time a supply crisis has originated from that area, he noted.
In early August, Russia announced an export ban that it would review at the end of the year, but Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced Thursday that the ban on grain exports would extend into 2011. The price of wheat jumped again, and that has had a spillover effect into other grains like corn and soybeans. The forecast for the global rice harvest has also dropped, although it is still expected to be higher than in 2009 and should be a record, the F.A.O. said.
“If you look at the numbers globally, the Americans, the Europeans and the Australians can make up the supply,” Mr. Abbassian said of the wheat harvest, playing down the chances of repeating the 2008 crisis. “There is no reason for this hype, but once the psychological thing sets in it is hard to change that perception, especially if Russia keeps sending bad news.”
After two days of rioting set off by price increases for bread and utilities like electricity and water, the streets in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, were largely calm on Friday. But 10 people had been killed and 300 injured, Health Minister Ivo Garrido told a news conference, local news agencies reported. Price increases have been much sharper in Mozambique than in most of the world because the government kept prices artificially low before elections last year, some analysts said.
As with any commodity, questions of wheat shortages spur speculation and hoarding, and experts suggest both are at play in the current market. They believe more money is washing through the commodity market for wheat because with interest rates so low and the stock market so volatile, investors are putting their money in the Chicago Board of Trade.
But the world also has to come to grips with changing weather patterns due to climate change, argued Prof. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, an expert in international agriculture at Cornell University.
“We are going to have much bigger fluctuations in weather and therefore the food supply than we had in the past, so we are going to have to learn how to cope with fluctuating food prices,” Professor Pinstrup-Anderson said.
Barry Bearak contributed reporting from Johannesburg.
September 12, 2010
Not a Food Crisis
Russia’s misguided decision to ban exports of wheat for the next 12 months has sent a destabilizing shock through agricultural markets, pushing prices of grains to their highest levels since 2007 and 2008, when food shortages sparked rioting around the world. The situation in poor grain-importing countries in Africa is tense. In Mozambique, the government backtracked on its decision to raise bread prices by 30 percent after riots in which more than a dozen people died. Still, the world need not experience another food crisis.
This year’s cereal harvest was the third largest on record, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Cereal stocks are at their highest point in eight years. Though drought in Russia and other big wheat producers like Australia is likely to reduce output, wheat stocks should remain substantially above two years ago, when they plunged to their lowest levels in three decades.
The danger is that misguided policies could still produce a food shortage. The ban on wheat exports announced by Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest exporter, pushed prices way above what its drought would justify. Importing nations scrambled for other sources of supply.
Russia magnified the effect by asking Kazakhstan and Belarus to impose their own bans. If other big agricultural producers were to follow Russia’s example, they would worsen market instability and help spread hunger.
Russia should learn from the last food crisis, which was caused in part by a jump in demand by the biofuels industry and rising demand in developing countries. But it was exacerbated when about 30 countries imposed restrictions on the export of agricultural products. Importing countries stockpiled food, further reducing supplies.
This year, in India, which has had a wheat export ban for the last three years, a bumper crop has led the government to stockpile. Press reports say the grain is rotting in storage. Hoarding, by exporters and importers, will only increase prices further.
The concerns in Russia about its grain supplies are understandable, but it could still buy at reasonable prices on world markets — if it and other big food exporters agreed not to impose controls. That would help return stability to the markets, where countries could make up any temporary shortfalls.
The Food and Agriculture Organization will meet on Sept. 24 to discuss the volatility in grain markets. Some of the causes — like climate change — do not lend themselves to easy solutions. But if the agency could broker an agreement not to impose export controls, it would go a long way toward protecting food security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/opini ... &th&emc=th
Not a Food Crisis
Russia’s misguided decision to ban exports of wheat for the next 12 months has sent a destabilizing shock through agricultural markets, pushing prices of grains to their highest levels since 2007 and 2008, when food shortages sparked rioting around the world. The situation in poor grain-importing countries in Africa is tense. In Mozambique, the government backtracked on its decision to raise bread prices by 30 percent after riots in which more than a dozen people died. Still, the world need not experience another food crisis.
This year’s cereal harvest was the third largest on record, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Cereal stocks are at their highest point in eight years. Though drought in Russia and other big wheat producers like Australia is likely to reduce output, wheat stocks should remain substantially above two years ago, when they plunged to their lowest levels in three decades.
The danger is that misguided policies could still produce a food shortage. The ban on wheat exports announced by Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest exporter, pushed prices way above what its drought would justify. Importing nations scrambled for other sources of supply.
Russia magnified the effect by asking Kazakhstan and Belarus to impose their own bans. If other big agricultural producers were to follow Russia’s example, they would worsen market instability and help spread hunger.
Russia should learn from the last food crisis, which was caused in part by a jump in demand by the biofuels industry and rising demand in developing countries. But it was exacerbated when about 30 countries imposed restrictions on the export of agricultural products. Importing countries stockpiled food, further reducing supplies.
This year, in India, which has had a wheat export ban for the last three years, a bumper crop has led the government to stockpile. Press reports say the grain is rotting in storage. Hoarding, by exporters and importers, will only increase prices further.
The concerns in Russia about its grain supplies are understandable, but it could still buy at reasonable prices on world markets — if it and other big food exporters agreed not to impose controls. That would help return stability to the markets, where countries could make up any temporary shortfalls.
The Food and Agriculture Organization will meet on Sept. 24 to discuss the volatility in grain markets. Some of the causes — like climate change — do not lend themselves to easy solutions. But if the agency could broker an agreement not to impose export controls, it would go a long way toward protecting food security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/opini ... &th&emc=th
January 10, 2011, 9:54 am
Beyond the Eternal Food Fight
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
10:13 a.m. | Updated
Almost every time global prices surge and the media and public reach out to analysts for meaning, a decades-long food fight resumes.
The latest price surge is clearcut, bringing food costs up to or past peaks reached in 2008. With populations and appetites growing, with climate changing, Is this the edge of the cliff or just another bump in a long, climbing road?
The combatants:
- Experts who foresee calamity as fast-rising demand for food (and everything else) strains farmers’ capacity to keep up, while pulses of drought, heat or flooding, conflict, speculation or disruptive policies (the biofuel boom) cause ripples and occasional rogue waves in prices.
- Experts who repeatedly, and less sexily, note that humanity, on the whole, has always overcome shortages and found ways to produce ever more food even as mouths multiply and rising incomes move families up the food chain from grains to meats and dairy. They’re mostly not saying, “Don’t worry, be happy,” but they’re definitely not urging listeners to buy food insurance, as Glenn Beck’s show periodically does, or to gird for the collapse of modern civilization, as resource pessimists have long intoned. (That last note is primarily for those who only tend to see alarmism at one end of the spectrum.)
Given the new burst of concern over volatile and rising global food prices from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and various aid and environmental campaigners, late last week I sent some questions to a broad array of scholars and analysts focused on global resources and demands.
Below you can read my missive, with e-mail shorthand slightly cleaned up, followed by an exchange this query triggered between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling.
More....
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ ... n&emc=tya3
Beyond the Eternal Food Fight
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
10:13 a.m. | Updated
Almost every time global prices surge and the media and public reach out to analysts for meaning, a decades-long food fight resumes.
The latest price surge is clearcut, bringing food costs up to or past peaks reached in 2008. With populations and appetites growing, with climate changing, Is this the edge of the cliff or just another bump in a long, climbing road?
The combatants:
- Experts who foresee calamity as fast-rising demand for food (and everything else) strains farmers’ capacity to keep up, while pulses of drought, heat or flooding, conflict, speculation or disruptive policies (the biofuel boom) cause ripples and occasional rogue waves in prices.
- Experts who repeatedly, and less sexily, note that humanity, on the whole, has always overcome shortages and found ways to produce ever more food even as mouths multiply and rising incomes move families up the food chain from grains to meats and dairy. They’re mostly not saying, “Don’t worry, be happy,” but they’re definitely not urging listeners to buy food insurance, as Glenn Beck’s show periodically does, or to gird for the collapse of modern civilization, as resource pessimists have long intoned. (That last note is primarily for those who only tend to see alarmism at one end of the spectrum.)
Given the new burst of concern over volatile and rising global food prices from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and various aid and environmental campaigners, late last week I sent some questions to a broad array of scholars and analysts focused on global resources and demands.
Below you can read my missive, with e-mail shorthand slightly cleaned up, followed by an exchange this query triggered between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling.
More....
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ ... n&emc=tya3
January 10, 2011, 5:06 pm
Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
On many issues relevant to charting a smooth human journey in this century, arguments are often framed between camps seeking to promote and spread “sustainable” behaviors and those pushing to advance and/or disseminate “better” technologies. In such polarized discussions, it’s hard to find acknowledgment that a variegated world heading toward roughly 9 billion people by 2050 will almost assuredly require “ all of the above.”
Still, there is plenty of room for agreement, and potentially progress.
Exchanges here this morning between Vaclav Smil and Lester Brown on food security revealed utterly divergent forecasts and preferences, but agreement on one uncomfortable reality — that substantial technological advances, along with shifts in appetites in prosperous societies, will be needed to fit human appetites on a finite, thriving planet.
On the production end, finding agreement on what the science writer Paul Voosen recently described as “a unified theory of farming” is unlikely. But finding ways to break down either-or thinking and foster traditional agricultural methods or advanced technologies where they fit best is clearly feasible.
On the consumption end, the challenges of moderating appetites may be greater.
As promised, here are more reactions to this same query from a wide range of other analysts and practitioners focused on food:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ ... n&emc=tya3
Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
On many issues relevant to charting a smooth human journey in this century, arguments are often framed between camps seeking to promote and spread “sustainable” behaviors and those pushing to advance and/or disseminate “better” technologies. In such polarized discussions, it’s hard to find acknowledgment that a variegated world heading toward roughly 9 billion people by 2050 will almost assuredly require “ all of the above.”
Still, there is plenty of room for agreement, and potentially progress.
Exchanges here this morning between Vaclav Smil and Lester Brown on food security revealed utterly divergent forecasts and preferences, but agreement on one uncomfortable reality — that substantial technological advances, along with shifts in appetites in prosperous societies, will be needed to fit human appetites on a finite, thriving planet.
On the production end, finding agreement on what the science writer Paul Voosen recently described as “a unified theory of farming” is unlikely. But finding ways to break down either-or thinking and foster traditional agricultural methods or advanced technologies where they fit best is clearly feasible.
On the consumption end, the challenges of moderating appetites may be greater.
As promised, here are more reactions to this same query from a wide range of other analysts and practitioners focused on food:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ ... n&emc=tya3
Updated February 15, 2011 08:06 PM
Is the World Producing Enough Food?
Introduction
food inflation in IndiaRupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters A rice seller in Kolkata, India, in January. Food inflation is still climbing in India.
Global food prices are soaring again, as droughts, freezes and floods have affected various crops in many parts of the world. At the same time, demand is rising with living standards in fast-growing countries.
The price spikes are not as sharp as they were in 2008, but the new volatility reflects more than the sum of recent freakish weather "events," from severe droughts in China and Russia to floods in Australia to a deep freeze in Mexico.
Economists and scientists have identified longer-term changes -- from global warming to China's economic growth to a lack of productive farmland -- as the culprits. Is the world producing enough food -- specifically grain? Is this a continuation of the 2008 crisis, or something quite different?
Read the Discussion »
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... &emc=thab1
Is the World Producing Enough Food?
Introduction
food inflation in IndiaRupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters A rice seller in Kolkata, India, in January. Food inflation is still climbing in India.
Global food prices are soaring again, as droughts, freezes and floods have affected various crops in many parts of the world. At the same time, demand is rising with living standards in fast-growing countries.
The price spikes are not as sharp as they were in 2008, but the new volatility reflects more than the sum of recent freakish weather "events," from severe droughts in China and Russia to floods in Australia to a deep freeze in Mexico.
Economists and scientists have identified longer-term changes -- from global warming to China's economic growth to a lack of productive farmland -- as the culprits. Is the world producing enough food -- specifically grain? Is this a continuation of the 2008 crisis, or something quite different?
Read the Discussion »
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... &emc=thab1
June 1, 2011
When the Nile Runs Dry
By LESTER R. BROWN
Washington
A NEW scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.
Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat — an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding. India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. And in countries like Congo and Zambia, China is acquiring land for biofuel production.
These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt.
Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. Egypt is now the world’s leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread — for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year — is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it.
As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt’s grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.)
Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today’s demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean.
The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river’s flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusinesses snatch up large swaths of arable land along the Upper Nile. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.
Now, when competing for Nile water, Cairo must deal with several governments and commercial interests that were not party to the 1959 agreement. Moreover, Ethiopia — never enamored of the agreement — has announced plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam on its branch of the Nile that would reduce the water flow to Egypt even more.
Because Egypt’s wheat yields are already among the world’s highest, it has little potential to raise its agricultural productivity. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge.
Egypt’s plight could become part of a larger, more troubling scenario. Its upstream Nile neighbors — Sudan, with 44 million people, and Ethiopia, with 83 million — are growing even faster, increasing the need for water to produce food. Projections by the United Nations show the combined population of these three countries increasing to 272 million by 2025 — and 360 million by 2050 — from 208 million now.
Growing water demand, driven by population growth and foreign land and water acquisitions, are straining the Nile’s natural limits. Avoiding dangerous conflicts over water will require three transnational initiatives. First, governments must address the population threat head-on by ensuring that all women have access to family planning services and by providing education for girls in the region. Second, countries must adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies and plant less water-intensive crops.
Finally, for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabs by foreign governments and agribusiness firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban, similar to the World Bank’s role in facilitating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, would likely be necessary to make it a reality.
None of these initiatives will be easy to implement, but all are essential. Without them, rising bread prices could undermine Egypt’s revolution of hope and competition for the Nile’s water could turn deadly.
Lester R. Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of “World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/opini ... n&emc=tya3
When the Nile Runs Dry
By LESTER R. BROWN
Washington
A NEW scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.
Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat — an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding. India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. And in countries like Congo and Zambia, China is acquiring land for biofuel production.
These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt.
Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. Egypt is now the world’s leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread — for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year — is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it.
As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt’s grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.)
Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today’s demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean.
The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river’s flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusinesses snatch up large swaths of arable land along the Upper Nile. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.
Now, when competing for Nile water, Cairo must deal with several governments and commercial interests that were not party to the 1959 agreement. Moreover, Ethiopia — never enamored of the agreement — has announced plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam on its branch of the Nile that would reduce the water flow to Egypt even more.
Because Egypt’s wheat yields are already among the world’s highest, it has little potential to raise its agricultural productivity. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge.
Egypt’s plight could become part of a larger, more troubling scenario. Its upstream Nile neighbors — Sudan, with 44 million people, and Ethiopia, with 83 million — are growing even faster, increasing the need for water to produce food. Projections by the United Nations show the combined population of these three countries increasing to 272 million by 2025 — and 360 million by 2050 — from 208 million now.
Growing water demand, driven by population growth and foreign land and water acquisitions, are straining the Nile’s natural limits. Avoiding dangerous conflicts over water will require three transnational initiatives. First, governments must address the population threat head-on by ensuring that all women have access to family planning services and by providing education for girls in the region. Second, countries must adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies and plant less water-intensive crops.
Finally, for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabs by foreign governments and agribusiness firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban, similar to the World Bank’s role in facilitating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, would likely be necessary to make it a reality.
None of these initiatives will be easy to implement, but all are essential. Without them, rising bread prices could undermine Egypt’s revolution of hope and competition for the Nile’s water could turn deadly.
Lester R. Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of “World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/opini ... n&emc=tya3
August 18, 2011
Engineering Food for All
By NINA V. FEDOROFF
Washington
FOOD prices are at record highs and the ranks of the hungry are swelling once again. A warming climate is beginning to nibble at crop yields worldwide. The United Nations predicts that there will be one to three billion more people to feed by midcentury.
Yet even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.
Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.
These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.
New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods. This is because the gene modifications are crafted based on knowledge of what genes do, in contrast to the shotgun approach of traditional breeding or using chemicals or radiation to induce mutations. The results have been spectacular.
For example, genetically modified crops containing an extra gene that confers resistance to certain insects require much less pesticide. This is good for the environment because toxic pesticides decrease the supply of food for birds and run off the land to poison rivers, lakes and oceans.
The rapid adoption of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant soybeans has made it easier for farmers to park their plows and forgo tilling for weed control. No-till farming is more sustainable and environmentally benign because it decreases soil erosion and shrinks agriculture’s carbon footprint.
In 2010, crops modified by molecular methods were grown in 29 countries on more than 360 million acres. Of the 15.4 million farmers growing these crops, 90 percent are poor, with small operations. The reason farmers turn to genetically modified crops is simple: yields increase and costs decrease.
Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.
Yet today we have only a handful of genetically modified crops, primarily soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. All are commodity crops mainly used for feed or fiber and all were developed by big biotech companies. Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government’s three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
Decades ago, when molecular approaches to plant improvement were relatively new, there was some rationale for a cautious approach.
But now the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.
It is time to relieve the regulatory burden slowing down the development of genetically modified crops. The three United States regulatory agencies need to develop a single set of requirements and focus solely on the hazards — if any — posed by new traits.
And above all, the government needs to stop regulating genetic modifications for which there is no scientifically credible evidence of harm.
Nina V. Fedoroff, who was the science and technology adviser to the secretary of state from 2007 to 2010, is a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/opini ... emc=tha212
Engineering Food for All
By NINA V. FEDOROFF
Washington
FOOD prices are at record highs and the ranks of the hungry are swelling once again. A warming climate is beginning to nibble at crop yields worldwide. The United Nations predicts that there will be one to three billion more people to feed by midcentury.
Yet even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.
Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.
These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.
New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods. This is because the gene modifications are crafted based on knowledge of what genes do, in contrast to the shotgun approach of traditional breeding or using chemicals or radiation to induce mutations. The results have been spectacular.
For example, genetically modified crops containing an extra gene that confers resistance to certain insects require much less pesticide. This is good for the environment because toxic pesticides decrease the supply of food for birds and run off the land to poison rivers, lakes and oceans.
The rapid adoption of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant soybeans has made it easier for farmers to park their plows and forgo tilling for weed control. No-till farming is more sustainable and environmentally benign because it decreases soil erosion and shrinks agriculture’s carbon footprint.
In 2010, crops modified by molecular methods were grown in 29 countries on more than 360 million acres. Of the 15.4 million farmers growing these crops, 90 percent are poor, with small operations. The reason farmers turn to genetically modified crops is simple: yields increase and costs decrease.
Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.
Yet today we have only a handful of genetically modified crops, primarily soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. All are commodity crops mainly used for feed or fiber and all were developed by big biotech companies. Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government’s three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
Decades ago, when molecular approaches to plant improvement were relatively new, there was some rationale for a cautious approach.
But now the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.
It is time to relieve the regulatory burden slowing down the development of genetically modified crops. The three United States regulatory agencies need to develop a single set of requirements and focus solely on the hazards — if any — posed by new traits.
And above all, the government needs to stop regulating genetic modifications for which there is no scientifically credible evidence of harm.
Nina V. Fedoroff, who was the science and technology adviser to the secretary of state from 2007 to 2010, is a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/opini ... emc=tha212
As Grain Piles Up, India’s Poor Still Go Hungry
By VIKAS BAJAJ
RANWAN, India — In this north Indian village, workers recently dismantled stacks of burned and mildewed rice while flies swarmed nearby over spoiled wheat. Local residents said the rice crop had been sitting along the side of a highway for several years and was now being sent to a distillery to be turned into liquor.
Just 180 miles to the south, in a slum on the outskirts of New Delhi, Leela Devi struggled to feed her family of four on meager portions of flatbread and potatoes, which she said were all she could afford on her disability pension and the irregular wages of her day-laborer husband. Her family is among the estimated 250 million Indians who do not get enough to eat.
Such is the paradox of plenty in India’s food system. Spurred by agricultural innovation and generous farm subsidies, India now grows so much food that it has a bigger grain stockpile than any country except China, and it exports some of it to countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Yet one-fifth of its people are malnourished — double the rate of other developing countries like Vietnam and China — because of pervasive corruption, mismanagement and waste in the programs that are supposed to distribute food to the poor.
“The reason we are facing this problem is our refusal to distribute the grain that we buy from farmers to the people who need it,” said Biraj Patniak, a lawyer who advises India’s Supreme Court on food issues. “The only place that this grain deserves to be is in the stomachs of the people who are hungry.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/busin ... h_20120608
By VIKAS BAJAJ
RANWAN, India — In this north Indian village, workers recently dismantled stacks of burned and mildewed rice while flies swarmed nearby over spoiled wheat. Local residents said the rice crop had been sitting along the side of a highway for several years and was now being sent to a distillery to be turned into liquor.
Just 180 miles to the south, in a slum on the outskirts of New Delhi, Leela Devi struggled to feed her family of four on meager portions of flatbread and potatoes, which she said were all she could afford on her disability pension and the irregular wages of her day-laborer husband. Her family is among the estimated 250 million Indians who do not get enough to eat.
Such is the paradox of plenty in India’s food system. Spurred by agricultural innovation and generous farm subsidies, India now grows so much food that it has a bigger grain stockpile than any country except China, and it exports some of it to countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Yet one-fifth of its people are malnourished — double the rate of other developing countries like Vietnam and China — because of pervasive corruption, mismanagement and waste in the programs that are supposed to distribute food to the poor.
“The reason we are facing this problem is our refusal to distribute the grain that we buy from farmers to the people who need it,” said Biraj Patniak, a lawyer who advises India’s Supreme Court on food issues. “The only place that this grain deserves to be is in the stomachs of the people who are hungry.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/busin ... h_20120608
February 5, 2013
The Global Farmland Rush
By MICHAEL KUGELMAN
WASHINGTON
OVER the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for agriculture. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their people are in danger of losing their patrimony, not to mention their sources of food.
According to Oxfam, land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain was sold or leased worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern Mozambique, a Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000 square miles — an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined — for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square miles of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had long used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships with local investors as domestic corporations.
The commoditization of global agriculture has aggravated the destabilizing effects of these large-scale land grabs. Investors typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food security.
However, few of these benefits materialize. For example, as The Economist reported, a Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new jobs when it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154 square miles in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it produced only 50.
Many investors, in fact, use their own labor force, not local workers, and few share their technology and expertise. Moreover, about two-thirds of foreign investors in developing countries expect to sell their harvests elsewhere. These exports may not even be for human consumption. In 2008 in Sudan, the United Arab Emirates was growing sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, to feed camels back home.
Much of the land being acquired is in conflict-prone countries. One of the largest deals — the acquisition by investors led by the Saudi Binladin Group of some 4,600 square miles in Indonesia — was put on hold because the area, in Papua, was torn by strife.
The prospects for conflict are heightened by legal uncertainties. Often, an absence of authoritative land registration and titles makes it easy for foreign investors, with the connivance of host governments, to secure land that local communities have long depended upon, even if they cannot demonstrate formal ownership. About 500 million sub-Saharan Africans rely on such communally held land, and land sales can be devastating, as in Mali. Access to food is often cut off, livelihoods are shattered and communities are uprooted.
Not surprisingly, the land sales provoke protests and then repression. Last year, in Cambodia, where 55 percent of arable land has been acquired by domestic and foreign agribusiness interests, the authorities killed an activist, a journalist and a teenage girl facing eviction; jailed other activists, and harassed politically active Buddhist monks.
To be sure, financiers have invested in farmland for centuries: Ancient Romans acquired assets in North Africa, just as American fruit companies secured plantations in Central America a century ago. But today’s transactions are far bigger. Nearly 200 private equity firms are expected to have almost $30 billion in private capital invested by 2015.
Some speculators just sit on high-value land they have acquired without cultivating it. In many traditional communities, this feels like a desecration, a violation of land’s purpose and meaning. That kind of capitalist disregard can set the stage for pitched battles over land that investors see as uninhabited, but that local communities cherish as a source of food, water and medicine, or venerate as ancestral burial grounds.
The chief drivers of the global farmland race — population growth, food and energy demand, volatile commodity prices, land and water shortages — won’t slow anytime soon. Neither will extreme weather events and other effects of climate change on natural resources.
In theory, host countries could limit how much land can be acquired by foreigners, or require that a minimum portion of harvests be sold in local markets. Argentina and Brazil have announced measures to limit or ban new land concessions. But investors use their wealth and their own governments’ power to impede regulation. Host governments should establish better land registration practices and enact safeguards against the displacement of their citizens. The World Bank and other international entities must ensure that their development projects are free from the taint of exploitative practices.
Of course, this will be difficult because so many host governments are riddled with corruption and prioritize profit-making land deals over the needs of their populations. Cambodia, Laos and Sudan — all sites of transnational land purchases — are among the world’s 20 most corrupt nations, according to Transparency International.
“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” is a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain. These days, that advice is being heeded all too well.
Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is co-editor of “The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opini ... h_20130206
The Global Farmland Rush
By MICHAEL KUGELMAN
WASHINGTON
OVER the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for agriculture. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their people are in danger of losing their patrimony, not to mention their sources of food.
According to Oxfam, land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain was sold or leased worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern Mozambique, a Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000 square miles — an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined — for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square miles of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had long used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships with local investors as domestic corporations.
The commoditization of global agriculture has aggravated the destabilizing effects of these large-scale land grabs. Investors typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food security.
However, few of these benefits materialize. For example, as The Economist reported, a Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new jobs when it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154 square miles in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it produced only 50.
Many investors, in fact, use their own labor force, not local workers, and few share their technology and expertise. Moreover, about two-thirds of foreign investors in developing countries expect to sell their harvests elsewhere. These exports may not even be for human consumption. In 2008 in Sudan, the United Arab Emirates was growing sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, to feed camels back home.
Much of the land being acquired is in conflict-prone countries. One of the largest deals — the acquisition by investors led by the Saudi Binladin Group of some 4,600 square miles in Indonesia — was put on hold because the area, in Papua, was torn by strife.
The prospects for conflict are heightened by legal uncertainties. Often, an absence of authoritative land registration and titles makes it easy for foreign investors, with the connivance of host governments, to secure land that local communities have long depended upon, even if they cannot demonstrate formal ownership. About 500 million sub-Saharan Africans rely on such communally held land, and land sales can be devastating, as in Mali. Access to food is often cut off, livelihoods are shattered and communities are uprooted.
Not surprisingly, the land sales provoke protests and then repression. Last year, in Cambodia, where 55 percent of arable land has been acquired by domestic and foreign agribusiness interests, the authorities killed an activist, a journalist and a teenage girl facing eviction; jailed other activists, and harassed politically active Buddhist monks.
To be sure, financiers have invested in farmland for centuries: Ancient Romans acquired assets in North Africa, just as American fruit companies secured plantations in Central America a century ago. But today’s transactions are far bigger. Nearly 200 private equity firms are expected to have almost $30 billion in private capital invested by 2015.
Some speculators just sit on high-value land they have acquired without cultivating it. In many traditional communities, this feels like a desecration, a violation of land’s purpose and meaning. That kind of capitalist disregard can set the stage for pitched battles over land that investors see as uninhabited, but that local communities cherish as a source of food, water and medicine, or venerate as ancestral burial grounds.
The chief drivers of the global farmland race — population growth, food and energy demand, volatile commodity prices, land and water shortages — won’t slow anytime soon. Neither will extreme weather events and other effects of climate change on natural resources.
In theory, host countries could limit how much land can be acquired by foreigners, or require that a minimum portion of harvests be sold in local markets. Argentina and Brazil have announced measures to limit or ban new land concessions. But investors use their wealth and their own governments’ power to impede regulation. Host governments should establish better land registration practices and enact safeguards against the displacement of their citizens. The World Bank and other international entities must ensure that their development projects are free from the taint of exploitative practices.
Of course, this will be difficult because so many host governments are riddled with corruption and prioritize profit-making land deals over the needs of their populations. Cambodia, Laos and Sudan — all sites of transnational land purchases — are among the world’s 20 most corrupt nations, according to Transparency International.
“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” is a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain. These days, that advice is being heeded all too well.
Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is co-editor of “The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opini ... h_20130206
Countries Grab Farmland beyond Their Own Borders
To meet demand for food, fuel and wood, countries are snapping up property beyond their borders
By Mark Fischetti | Apr 14, 2015  
Fertile land is becoming scarce worldwide, especially for crops for food, feed, biofuels, timber and fiber such as cotton. To produce those goods, wealthy countries such as the U.S. and small countries with little space are buying up or leasing large tracts of land that are suitable for agriculture in other nations. Products are shipped back home or sold locally, at times squeezing out native farmers, landowners and businesses. In the past 15 years companies and government groups in “investor” countries have grabbed 31.8 million hectares of land, the area of New Mexico (column on right), according to the Land Matrix Global Observatory's database of transactions that target low- and middle-income countries. Crops are being produced on only 2.7 million of those hectares thus far (column on left). Overall, a large transfer of land ownership from the global south to the global north seems to be under way.
see also: Energy & Sustainability: 5 Steps to Feed the World and Sustain the Planet |
Evolution: What Siberian Burials Reveal about the Relationship between Humans and Dogs |
Health: The Conflicted History of Alcohol in Western Civilization |
Mind & Brain: Nail Biting May Arise from Perfectionism |
Space: Pluto Lover Alan Stern Discusses Historic July Flyby [Q&A] |
Technology: Timeline: The Amazing Multimillion-Year History of Processed Food
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... A_Facebook
To meet demand for food, fuel and wood, countries are snapping up property beyond their borders
By Mark Fischetti | Apr 14, 2015  
Fertile land is becoming scarce worldwide, especially for crops for food, feed, biofuels, timber and fiber such as cotton. To produce those goods, wealthy countries such as the U.S. and small countries with little space are buying up or leasing large tracts of land that are suitable for agriculture in other nations. Products are shipped back home or sold locally, at times squeezing out native farmers, landowners and businesses. In the past 15 years companies and government groups in “investor” countries have grabbed 31.8 million hectares of land, the area of New Mexico (column on right), according to the Land Matrix Global Observatory's database of transactions that target low- and middle-income countries. Crops are being produced on only 2.7 million of those hectares thus far (column on left). Overall, a large transfer of land ownership from the global south to the global north seems to be under way.
see also: Energy & Sustainability: 5 Steps to Feed the World and Sustain the Planet |
Evolution: What Siberian Burials Reveal about the Relationship between Humans and Dogs |
Health: The Conflicted History of Alcohol in Western Civilization |
Mind & Brain: Nail Biting May Arise from Perfectionism |
Space: Pluto Lover Alan Stern Discusses Historic July Flyby [Q&A] |
Technology: Timeline: The Amazing Multimillion-Year History of Processed Food
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... A_Facebook
Energizing the Green Revolution in Africa
In the summer of 2005, Andrew Youn, an M.B.A. student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, was traveling in western Kenya when he met two women, farmers who were living profoundly different lives.
Both were working small plots of land, but one was producing a yield of two tons of maize per acre — better than Kenya’s national average — while the other was producing one quarter that amount. The difference meant the world. One family had enough to eat during the “hunger season” — the months before the late-summer harvest. The other didn’t. One family had decent housing and clothing and the children were healthy. The second family was living a meager existence, Youn recalled. “She had lost a child and it was unlikely that her four remaining children would be able to complete high school.”
The difference? One woman was doing what many farmers around the world had been doing since the Green Revolution began in the 1960s — using improved hybrid crop varieties and fertilizer and incorporating planting techniques proven to boost food production. As Tina Rosenberg has reported, the Green Revolution transformed agricultural practices across Asia and Latin America — doubling world food production from 1960 to 1990 and saving countless lives — but, for a variety of reasons, it has not yet taken hold across Africa. Among the billion people today who are living in extreme poverty — subsisting on less than $1.25 a day — one-fourth are smallholder farmers in Africa.
“In the fight against global poverty, there are very few hugely powerful leverage points,” says Youn. “The majority of the world’s poor people are farmers; they share one profession, and we figured out how to make that profession way more productive 50 years ago. There is a common solution that could substantially improve their productivity.”
Since his visit to Kenya, Youn has been obsessed with making that solution widely available in Africa. In 2006, he co-founded a nonprofit organization, One Acre Fund, with offices around East Africa, to assist smallholder farmers; today, the organization has a staff of 2,500 who deliver farming inputs, training and market assistance to 280,000 families in rural Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, with a plan to be serving a million families by 2020.
This work is part of a historic shift. “The African Green Revolution is emerging,” said Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “In the last 10 years, yields of cereal grains like maize have increased by about 50 percent from 1 to 1.5 tons per hectare, but they’re still pretty miserable.” (In Asia and Latin America, yields are 3 tons per hectare.) “But it will happen,” Sanchez adds. “Many African countries are serious about this. The main barrier has been access to improved varieties of crops and fertilizers.”
More....
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... d=45305309
Saving the Cows, Starving the Children
London — GANDHI famously denied himself food. And by starving himself to protest British rule, he ultimately made India stronger. But India’s leaders today are using food as a weapon, and they are sacrificing not themselves, but others. Their decisions threaten to make India’s children — already among the most undernourished in the world — weaker still.
Earlier this month, the chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, struck down a proposed pilot project to introduce eggs in free government nursery schools in districts populated by economically disadvantaged indigenous groups. The proposal came from the state’s own officials, but was dismissed by Mr. Chouhan on the grounds that eggs are a nonvegetarian food. Mr. Chouhan, like many Hindus, is a vegetarian and avoids eggs because they may be fertilized and are seen as a life force. While he has refused to address this incident publicly, his press officer claimed there were “more nutritious options available.” But what, exactly?
In Madhya Pradesh, many of the poor communities survive on government-subsidized grain and foraged plants. According to the last National Family Health Survey, indigenous children were the most malnourished of any community in the state. Even across the state, 52 percent of children under 6 — the age up to which they may attend government nurseries — are underweight, says the National Institute of Nutrition. Indeed Madhya Pradesh, the economist Jean Drèze told me, “is far worse than even the Indian average.” It is in the grip of a “nutritional emergency,” he said.
Child-rights activists had supported the proposal, because eggs — a superfood that is about 10 percent fat and extremely high in protein — are the most nutritional way to improve the children’s health, more so than a cup of milk or a banana, which the state claims it will offer in place of eggs. Bananas spoil easily, and milk is often laced in India with paint, detergent or shampoo, so much so that the federal government is considering making milk adulteration punishable with life imprisonment.
Another staple food was taken from the plates of the poor in the neighboring state of Maharashtra, after it banned the possession and sale of beef. It is enforceable with a prison term of up to five years. Hindus consider cows to be sacred, but Hindu nationalists, emboldened by the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have lobbied aggressively on the issue, not out of concern for the animals — which are typically bone-thin and live on garbage — but to force their religious beliefs on non-Hindus. The ban, implemented in March, was a body blow to the poor. Beef, unlike mutton and chicken, is cheap. It is an important source of protein for low-caste Dalits, and for minority communities like Muslims and Christians.
The decision by Devendra Fadnavis, chief minister of Maharashtra, is appalling given the widespread poverty in his state. It is also inhumane toward the very animals it claims to protect. The Indian Express newspaper reports that farmers don’t know what to do with dying cattle. Since they can neither sell nor butcher them, they are letting the animals loose to fend for themselves. Surely, there is nothing sacred about starving cows.
These decisions are not the first of their kind. Over the years, at least 20 Indian states out of 29 have banned cow slaughter (although Maharashtra’s laws are the harshest). And eggs are offered in meal plans in only 10 states. But these decisions are startling in the face of new reports reiterating that Indians urgently need more food — not less — and of a higher nutritious standard than what they get now.
India has twice as many malnourished children as sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank, and our children are often shorter than those born in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Unicef, 51 percent of children under 5 in rural India are stunted. Compare this with neighboring China, where the stunting rate for rural children is 12 percent. And hunger isn’t just stunting our kids’ growth; it is also affecting their intelligence.
Supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party tried to shift the blame for these poor decisions onto leaders of the Jain faith — who did indeed lobby for the changes, and were involved in drafting the beef ban legislation.
The Jains are strict vegetarians who do not consume food that involves the injury or death of a living being. They won’t eat meat or fish, and they also avoid eggs.
But even the most uncompromising Jain can’t be blamed for the fact that the B.J.P. has denied eggs to children in all but one state it runs.
Similarly, the beef ban has less to do with the demands of one group than the party line. Last month, Amit Shah, the B.J.P. president and a vegetarian, said, “Wherever there is a B.J.P. government, there is a ban on beef.” (This is not quite the case as yet, but it is clearly the direction the party is taking.)
The B.J.P. is determined to deny children eggs even though every nursery currently offering the option also offers a vegetarian alternative — such as a cup of milk or a piece of fruit. No child is forced to eat food that contradicts his or her religious beliefs. But all children will now be denied certain foods in order to adhere to the religion of others.
In India you are what you eat, and devotion to strict vegetarianism is a trait common to many upper-caste Hindus. Some wield their diet like a badge of their status. Others demand that people around them — like children and household staff members — eat as they do to maintain the purity of their kitchens. They will not visit restaurants that also serve nonvegetarian food for fear of being polluted.
Privileged politicians are imposing their will on underprivileged people, who do not share their beliefs and also do not have the luxury of rejecting cheap sources of protein. By injecting religion and caste into politics, the B.J.P. is preventing India from moving forward by reinforcing the prejudices that have kept it back.
In a speech last September, Mr. Modi said, “If the determination is strong, then I believe that youngsters and children of this country have the strength and talent to move forward.” But many of our children are not strong, precisely because politicians are depriving them of basic nutrition. India is suffering a huge loss of human capital in the process, and foolishly turning an enormous asset into a liability.
If Mr. Modi’s goal is to take India forward, he must reassess his party’s priorities and stop allowing religion to dictate policy. It’s a simple choice: The B.J.P. government can either feed our children or undermine the country’s future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opini ... ef=opinion
In the summer of 2005, Andrew Youn, an M.B.A. student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, was traveling in western Kenya when he met two women, farmers who were living profoundly different lives.
Both were working small plots of land, but one was producing a yield of two tons of maize per acre — better than Kenya’s national average — while the other was producing one quarter that amount. The difference meant the world. One family had enough to eat during the “hunger season” — the months before the late-summer harvest. The other didn’t. One family had decent housing and clothing and the children were healthy. The second family was living a meager existence, Youn recalled. “She had lost a child and it was unlikely that her four remaining children would be able to complete high school.”
The difference? One woman was doing what many farmers around the world had been doing since the Green Revolution began in the 1960s — using improved hybrid crop varieties and fertilizer and incorporating planting techniques proven to boost food production. As Tina Rosenberg has reported, the Green Revolution transformed agricultural practices across Asia and Latin America — doubling world food production from 1960 to 1990 and saving countless lives — but, for a variety of reasons, it has not yet taken hold across Africa. Among the billion people today who are living in extreme poverty — subsisting on less than $1.25 a day — one-fourth are smallholder farmers in Africa.
“In the fight against global poverty, there are very few hugely powerful leverage points,” says Youn. “The majority of the world’s poor people are farmers; they share one profession, and we figured out how to make that profession way more productive 50 years ago. There is a common solution that could substantially improve their productivity.”
Since his visit to Kenya, Youn has been obsessed with making that solution widely available in Africa. In 2006, he co-founded a nonprofit organization, One Acre Fund, with offices around East Africa, to assist smallholder farmers; today, the organization has a staff of 2,500 who deliver farming inputs, training and market assistance to 280,000 families in rural Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, with a plan to be serving a million families by 2020.
This work is part of a historic shift. “The African Green Revolution is emerging,” said Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “In the last 10 years, yields of cereal grains like maize have increased by about 50 percent from 1 to 1.5 tons per hectare, but they’re still pretty miserable.” (In Asia and Latin America, yields are 3 tons per hectare.) “But it will happen,” Sanchez adds. “Many African countries are serious about this. The main barrier has been access to improved varieties of crops and fertilizers.”
More....
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... d=45305309
Saving the Cows, Starving the Children
London — GANDHI famously denied himself food. And by starving himself to protest British rule, he ultimately made India stronger. But India’s leaders today are using food as a weapon, and they are sacrificing not themselves, but others. Their decisions threaten to make India’s children — already among the most undernourished in the world — weaker still.
Earlier this month, the chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, struck down a proposed pilot project to introduce eggs in free government nursery schools in districts populated by economically disadvantaged indigenous groups. The proposal came from the state’s own officials, but was dismissed by Mr. Chouhan on the grounds that eggs are a nonvegetarian food. Mr. Chouhan, like many Hindus, is a vegetarian and avoids eggs because they may be fertilized and are seen as a life force. While he has refused to address this incident publicly, his press officer claimed there were “more nutritious options available.” But what, exactly?
In Madhya Pradesh, many of the poor communities survive on government-subsidized grain and foraged plants. According to the last National Family Health Survey, indigenous children were the most malnourished of any community in the state. Even across the state, 52 percent of children under 6 — the age up to which they may attend government nurseries — are underweight, says the National Institute of Nutrition. Indeed Madhya Pradesh, the economist Jean Drèze told me, “is far worse than even the Indian average.” It is in the grip of a “nutritional emergency,” he said.
Child-rights activists had supported the proposal, because eggs — a superfood that is about 10 percent fat and extremely high in protein — are the most nutritional way to improve the children’s health, more so than a cup of milk or a banana, which the state claims it will offer in place of eggs. Bananas spoil easily, and milk is often laced in India with paint, detergent or shampoo, so much so that the federal government is considering making milk adulteration punishable with life imprisonment.
Another staple food was taken from the plates of the poor in the neighboring state of Maharashtra, after it banned the possession and sale of beef. It is enforceable with a prison term of up to five years. Hindus consider cows to be sacred, but Hindu nationalists, emboldened by the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have lobbied aggressively on the issue, not out of concern for the animals — which are typically bone-thin and live on garbage — but to force their religious beliefs on non-Hindus. The ban, implemented in March, was a body blow to the poor. Beef, unlike mutton and chicken, is cheap. It is an important source of protein for low-caste Dalits, and for minority communities like Muslims and Christians.
The decision by Devendra Fadnavis, chief minister of Maharashtra, is appalling given the widespread poverty in his state. It is also inhumane toward the very animals it claims to protect. The Indian Express newspaper reports that farmers don’t know what to do with dying cattle. Since they can neither sell nor butcher them, they are letting the animals loose to fend for themselves. Surely, there is nothing sacred about starving cows.
These decisions are not the first of their kind. Over the years, at least 20 Indian states out of 29 have banned cow slaughter (although Maharashtra’s laws are the harshest). And eggs are offered in meal plans in only 10 states. But these decisions are startling in the face of new reports reiterating that Indians urgently need more food — not less — and of a higher nutritious standard than what they get now.
India has twice as many malnourished children as sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank, and our children are often shorter than those born in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Unicef, 51 percent of children under 5 in rural India are stunted. Compare this with neighboring China, where the stunting rate for rural children is 12 percent. And hunger isn’t just stunting our kids’ growth; it is also affecting their intelligence.
Supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party tried to shift the blame for these poor decisions onto leaders of the Jain faith — who did indeed lobby for the changes, and were involved in drafting the beef ban legislation.
The Jains are strict vegetarians who do not consume food that involves the injury or death of a living being. They won’t eat meat or fish, and they also avoid eggs.
But even the most uncompromising Jain can’t be blamed for the fact that the B.J.P. has denied eggs to children in all but one state it runs.
Similarly, the beef ban has less to do with the demands of one group than the party line. Last month, Amit Shah, the B.J.P. president and a vegetarian, said, “Wherever there is a B.J.P. government, there is a ban on beef.” (This is not quite the case as yet, but it is clearly the direction the party is taking.)
The B.J.P. is determined to deny children eggs even though every nursery currently offering the option also offers a vegetarian alternative — such as a cup of milk or a piece of fruit. No child is forced to eat food that contradicts his or her religious beliefs. But all children will now be denied certain foods in order to adhere to the religion of others.
In India you are what you eat, and devotion to strict vegetarianism is a trait common to many upper-caste Hindus. Some wield their diet like a badge of their status. Others demand that people around them — like children and household staff members — eat as they do to maintain the purity of their kitchens. They will not visit restaurants that also serve nonvegetarian food for fear of being polluted.
Privileged politicians are imposing their will on underprivileged people, who do not share their beliefs and also do not have the luxury of rejecting cheap sources of protein. By injecting religion and caste into politics, the B.J.P. is preventing India from moving forward by reinforcing the prejudices that have kept it back.
In a speech last September, Mr. Modi said, “If the determination is strong, then I believe that youngsters and children of this country have the strength and talent to move forward.” But many of our children are not strong, precisely because politicians are depriving them of basic nutrition. India is suffering a huge loss of human capital in the process, and foolishly turning an enormous asset into a liability.
If Mr. Modi’s goal is to take India forward, he must reassess his party’s priorities and stop allowing religion to dictate policy. It’s a simple choice: The B.J.P. government can either feed our children or undermine the country’s future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opini ... ef=opinion
‘What’s the Buzz About Wild Bees?’
Among all the pollinators, honeybees get the most publicity, deservedly, because of the problems around their survival. Claire Kremen’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, looks at diverse pollinators — not just bees, but also birds, moths and many insects — and the issues affecting them as emblematic of the broader problems of the food system. Pollinators are critical to global food production and about 75 percent of crop species depend on them to produce food that is more abundant and nutritious than it would otherwise be.
Monoculture — a single crop in an open field that may measure many hundreds of acres — increasingly depends on importing thousands of hives (by truck, usually) for the pollination of crops, especially in places like California. For example, the state produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds, which has concentrated the need for bees way beyond the capacity of native pollinators.
Focusing on a single crop reduces the biodiversity pollinators need to survive, and the timetable they best work on. It’s also a risky endeavor to rely on one species, especially when there are diseases, management problems and the inherent risks of transportation. Yet the large single-crop farms require the large apiaries to get the job done.
Kremen, who looks specifically at how to better support native pollinators in a monoculture landscape, sees an opportunity to change conditions on a farm to restore pollinators and ideally reduce the impact of pesticides also. But none of this can happen without rediversifying the landscape.
In the region from Davis to Capay Valley, Kremen and her colleagues work with farmers to install native plant hedgerows with a sequence of shrubs, flowering plants and grasses that bloom across a long period of time, providing a rich source of food to support diverse pollinators. Evidence shows that hedgerows and a varied landscape help restore pollinator diversity and reduce the need to import masses of vulnerable honeybees.
Diversifying the landscape would help reduce farmers’ dependence on honeybees and the many other problems of monoculture farming.
There is a video as well at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/opini ... d=45305309
Among all the pollinators, honeybees get the most publicity, deservedly, because of the problems around their survival. Claire Kremen’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, looks at diverse pollinators — not just bees, but also birds, moths and many insects — and the issues affecting them as emblematic of the broader problems of the food system. Pollinators are critical to global food production and about 75 percent of crop species depend on them to produce food that is more abundant and nutritious than it would otherwise be.
Monoculture — a single crop in an open field that may measure many hundreds of acres — increasingly depends on importing thousands of hives (by truck, usually) for the pollination of crops, especially in places like California. For example, the state produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds, which has concentrated the need for bees way beyond the capacity of native pollinators.
Focusing on a single crop reduces the biodiversity pollinators need to survive, and the timetable they best work on. It’s also a risky endeavor to rely on one species, especially when there are diseases, management problems and the inherent risks of transportation. Yet the large single-crop farms require the large apiaries to get the job done.
Kremen, who looks specifically at how to better support native pollinators in a monoculture landscape, sees an opportunity to change conditions on a farm to restore pollinators and ideally reduce the impact of pesticides also. But none of this can happen without rediversifying the landscape.
In the region from Davis to Capay Valley, Kremen and her colleagues work with farmers to install native plant hedgerows with a sequence of shrubs, flowering plants and grasses that bloom across a long period of time, providing a rich source of food to support diverse pollinators. Evidence shows that hedgerows and a varied landscape help restore pollinator diversity and reduce the need to import masses of vulnerable honeybees.
Diversifying the landscape would help reduce farmers’ dependence on honeybees and the many other problems of monoculture farming.
There is a video as well at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/opini ... d=45305309
The Next Genocide
New Haven — BEFORE he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, “You must die so that we can live.” As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us.
Today we think of the Nazi Final Solution as some dark apex of high technology. It was in fact the killing of human beings at close range during a war for resources. The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.
The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opini ... d=45305309
New Haven — BEFORE he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, “You must die so that we can live.” As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us.
Today we think of the Nazi Final Solution as some dark apex of high technology. It was in fact the killing of human beings at close range during a war for resources. The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.
The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opini ... d=45305309
We Need a New Green Revolution
DESPITE the four-year drought that has parched California and led to mandatory restrictions on water use, farmers there have kept feeding the country. California produces more of 66 different food crops than any other state, $54 billion of food annually.
Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is likely to become more difficult over the next few decades as weather patterns, available water and growing seasons shift further and threats of invasive weeds, pests and pathogens rise.
If agriculture is to have any chance of answering these challenges, we must have new and improved techniques and technologies. The problem is that agricultural innovation has not kept pace.
The last time our nation was in a similar crisis was just after the Dust Bowl years in the 1940s, but the country’s agricultural science enterprise was in much better shape. At that point, almost 40 percent of American research and development spending was focused on agriculture. This ambitious embrace of research was part of the “green revolution” that significantly boosted agricultural output around the world.
Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority; it constitutes only 2 percent of federal research and development spending. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, total agricultural production has slowed significantly since the turn of the century. We need another ambitious surge in agricultural science.
Consider the avian flu epidemic, in which more than 48 million birds were killed — 30 million in Iowa alone — because the only way to control an outbreak is to eradicate a farm’s entire flock. The Agriculture Department recorded only 219 birds that were actually sick with the flu. The $3.3 billion in losses have led to a search for a better method of controlling the virus than killing a farm’s flock because of one sick bird.
History has shown that science can solve the nation’s agriculture and food production problems, but to do so, the American system of food and agricultural research must be substantially reinvigorated. Research can tackle how to grow more food with fewer resources under increasingly difficult growing conditions. But this can be accomplished only if more of the brightest minds are engaged with enough funding to pursue transformative ideas.
While private sector research and development in agriculture have grown over the past decade and now exceed what is federally funded, this financing is focused on shorter term benefits. On the other hand, more than 80 percent of federally funded research is designed to provide the building blocks for long-term production increases to address the many problems we face in the decades ahead. These problems have been amplified by climate change and the demands of a growing global population.
Experience has shown that the best way forward is funding research through a competitive process, with projects selected through a peer-review procedure that excludes politics. There is a program in the Agriculture Department that embraces these tenets, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, and its research grants show great promise.
New, hardier varieties of corn are being developed from tropical species that can better withstand heat, drought and changes to the environment. The probiotics found in fermented products like yogurt are being tested to replace antibiotics used in animal husbandry. And nanotechnology and electrified micro-coatings of water are being applied to some produce, to prevent food poisoning. Government research is even exploring how to double the rate of photosynthesis and eliminate the need for pesticides.
Continue reading the main story
The potential is great, but the program has never been fully funded. Despite a $25 million increase in the omnibus budget agreement, the budget of the department’s research initiative sits at half of what Congress authorized in 2008 when it created the program. In the 2014 fiscal year, the program’s peer-review process identified approximately $1.1 billion in grants as worthy of funding, but the program could dispense only $270 million. We cannot kindle the next green revolution if we treat roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in worthwhile scientific ideas as if they were table scraps.
Throughout humanity’s existence, farming and food production have always benefited from innovative solutions that solved challenges and looked beyond the horizon. Now more than ever, we need to embrace 21st-century science, fund it and turn it loose so we can develop better methods of putting food on the table. Our world is changing; the way we grow and produce food needs a much richer diet of scientific ingenuity to keep pace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/opini ... d=71987722
DESPITE the four-year drought that has parched California and led to mandatory restrictions on water use, farmers there have kept feeding the country. California produces more of 66 different food crops than any other state, $54 billion of food annually.
Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is likely to become more difficult over the next few decades as weather patterns, available water and growing seasons shift further and threats of invasive weeds, pests and pathogens rise.
If agriculture is to have any chance of answering these challenges, we must have new and improved techniques and technologies. The problem is that agricultural innovation has not kept pace.
The last time our nation was in a similar crisis was just after the Dust Bowl years in the 1940s, but the country’s agricultural science enterprise was in much better shape. At that point, almost 40 percent of American research and development spending was focused on agriculture. This ambitious embrace of research was part of the “green revolution” that significantly boosted agricultural output around the world.
Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority; it constitutes only 2 percent of federal research and development spending. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, total agricultural production has slowed significantly since the turn of the century. We need another ambitious surge in agricultural science.
Consider the avian flu epidemic, in which more than 48 million birds were killed — 30 million in Iowa alone — because the only way to control an outbreak is to eradicate a farm’s entire flock. The Agriculture Department recorded only 219 birds that were actually sick with the flu. The $3.3 billion in losses have led to a search for a better method of controlling the virus than killing a farm’s flock because of one sick bird.
History has shown that science can solve the nation’s agriculture and food production problems, but to do so, the American system of food and agricultural research must be substantially reinvigorated. Research can tackle how to grow more food with fewer resources under increasingly difficult growing conditions. But this can be accomplished only if more of the brightest minds are engaged with enough funding to pursue transformative ideas.
While private sector research and development in agriculture have grown over the past decade and now exceed what is federally funded, this financing is focused on shorter term benefits. On the other hand, more than 80 percent of federally funded research is designed to provide the building blocks for long-term production increases to address the many problems we face in the decades ahead. These problems have been amplified by climate change and the demands of a growing global population.
Experience has shown that the best way forward is funding research through a competitive process, with projects selected through a peer-review procedure that excludes politics. There is a program in the Agriculture Department that embraces these tenets, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, and its research grants show great promise.
New, hardier varieties of corn are being developed from tropical species that can better withstand heat, drought and changes to the environment. The probiotics found in fermented products like yogurt are being tested to replace antibiotics used in animal husbandry. And nanotechnology and electrified micro-coatings of water are being applied to some produce, to prevent food poisoning. Government research is even exploring how to double the rate of photosynthesis and eliminate the need for pesticides.
Continue reading the main story
The potential is great, but the program has never been fully funded. Despite a $25 million increase in the omnibus budget agreement, the budget of the department’s research initiative sits at half of what Congress authorized in 2008 when it created the program. In the 2014 fiscal year, the program’s peer-review process identified approximately $1.1 billion in grants as worthy of funding, but the program could dispense only $270 million. We cannot kindle the next green revolution if we treat roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in worthwhile scientific ideas as if they were table scraps.
Throughout humanity’s existence, farming and food production have always benefited from innovative solutions that solved challenges and looked beyond the horizon. Now more than ever, we need to embrace 21st-century science, fund it and turn it loose so we can develop better methods of putting food on the table. Our world is changing; the way we grow and produce food needs a much richer diet of scientific ingenuity to keep pace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/opini ... d=71987722
Drought and Heat Took a Heavy Toll on Crops, Study Finds
Droughts and heat waves wiped out nearly a tenth of the rice, wheat, corn and other cereal crops in countries hit by extreme weather disasters between 1964 and 2007, according to a new study.
The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, examined data on the effects, over five decades, of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts on national crop harvests.
“People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production,” said Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report. “But we didn’t know by how much, and we didn’t have a basis for how that might change in the future.”
Dr. Ramankutty and his team combined data from a disaster database with food production information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. They looked at about 2,800 weather disasters, such as the 1983-1984 drought in Ethiopia and the 2003 European heat wave, along with data on 16 different cereals, including oats, barley, rye and maize, grown in 177 countries.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/scien ... 87722&_r=0
Droughts and heat waves wiped out nearly a tenth of the rice, wheat, corn and other cereal crops in countries hit by extreme weather disasters between 1964 and 2007, according to a new study.
The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, examined data on the effects, over five decades, of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts on national crop harvests.
“People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production,” said Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report. “But we didn’t know by how much, and we didn’t have a basis for how that might change in the future.”
Dr. Ramankutty and his team combined data from a disaster database with food production information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. They looked at about 2,800 weather disasters, such as the 1983-1984 drought in Ethiopia and the 2003 European heat wave, along with data on 16 different cereals, including oats, barley, rye and maize, grown in 177 countries.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/scien ... 87722&_r=0
Two-Thirds of the World Faces Severe Water Shortages
About four billion people, or two-thirds of the world’s population, face severe water shortages during at least one month every year, far more than was previously thought, according to Arjen Y. Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Hoekstra and his colleague Mesfin M. Mekonnen designed a computer model to create what they say is a more accurate picture of water scarcity around the world. Severe water scarcity can lead to crop failure and low crop yields, which could cause food price increases as well as famine and widespread starvation.
An area experiences severe water scarcity when its farms, industries and households consume double the amount of water available in that area.
“That means that groundwater levels are falling, lakes are drying up, less water is flowing in rivers, and water supplies for industry and farmers are threatened,” Dr. Hoekstra said in an email.
Not everyone would suffer equally. In more affluent countries, severe water scarcity could mean water rations for showering and gardening, while in very poor countries it could lead to shortages of drinking water.
Half of the four billion people who experience conditions of severe water scarcity at least one month of the year live in either China or India, Dr. Hoeskstra said. Of the remaining two billion, the majority live mostly in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico and the western and southern parts of the United States, such as California, Texas and Florida.
Previous studies had estimated that between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people were affected by extreme water shortages. But according to Dr. Hoekstra, those studies either used measurements that were too general in size or used yearly averages that were not as precise as monthly data.
“Freshwater scarcity is a major risk to the global economy, affecting four billion people directly,” Dr. Hoekstra said. “But since the remaining people in the world receive part of their food from the affected areas, it involves us all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/scien ... pe=article
About four billion people, or two-thirds of the world’s population, face severe water shortages during at least one month every year, far more than was previously thought, according to Arjen Y. Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Hoekstra and his colleague Mesfin M. Mekonnen designed a computer model to create what they say is a more accurate picture of water scarcity around the world. Severe water scarcity can lead to crop failure and low crop yields, which could cause food price increases as well as famine and widespread starvation.
An area experiences severe water scarcity when its farms, industries and households consume double the amount of water available in that area.
“That means that groundwater levels are falling, lakes are drying up, less water is flowing in rivers, and water supplies for industry and farmers are threatened,” Dr. Hoekstra said in an email.
Not everyone would suffer equally. In more affluent countries, severe water scarcity could mean water rations for showering and gardening, while in very poor countries it could lead to shortages of drinking water.
Half of the four billion people who experience conditions of severe water scarcity at least one month of the year live in either China or India, Dr. Hoeskstra said. Of the remaining two billion, the majority live mostly in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico and the western and southern parts of the United States, such as California, Texas and Florida.
Previous studies had estimated that between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people were affected by extreme water shortages. But according to Dr. Hoekstra, those studies either used measurements that were too general in size or used yearly averages that were not as precise as monthly data.
“Freshwater scarcity is a major risk to the global economy, affecting four billion people directly,” Dr. Hoekstra said. “But since the remaining people in the world receive part of their food from the affected areas, it involves us all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/scien ... pe=article
Decline of Pollinators Poses Threat to World Food Supply, Report Says
The birds and the bees need help. Also, the butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles and bats. Without an international effort, a new report warns, increasing numbers of species that promote the growth of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of food each year face extinction.
The first global assessment of the threats to creatures that pollinate the world’s plants was released by a group affiliated with the United Nations on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The summary will be posted online Monday.
Pollinators, including some 20,000 species of wild bees, contribute to the growth of fruit, vegetables and many nuts, as well as flowering plants. Plants that depend on pollination make up 35 percent of global crop production volume with a value of as much as $577 billion a year. The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide.
Many pollinator species are threatened with extinction, including some 16 percent of vertebrates like birds and bats, according to the document. Hummingbirds and some 2,000 avian species that feed on nectar spread pollen as they move from flower to flower. Extinction risk for insects is not as well defined, the report notes, but it warned of “high levels of threat” for some bees and butterflies, with at least 9 percent of bee and butterfly species at risk.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/scien ... d=71987722
The birds and the bees need help. Also, the butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles and bats. Without an international effort, a new report warns, increasing numbers of species that promote the growth of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of food each year face extinction.
The first global assessment of the threats to creatures that pollinate the world’s plants was released by a group affiliated with the United Nations on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The summary will be posted online Monday.
Pollinators, including some 20,000 species of wild bees, contribute to the growth of fruit, vegetables and many nuts, as well as flowering plants. Plants that depend on pollination make up 35 percent of global crop production volume with a value of as much as $577 billion a year. The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide.
Many pollinator species are threatened with extinction, including some 16 percent of vertebrates like birds and bats, according to the document. Hummingbirds and some 2,000 avian species that feed on nectar spread pollen as they move from flower to flower. Extinction risk for insects is not as well defined, the report notes, but it warned of “high levels of threat” for some bees and butterflies, with at least 9 percent of bee and butterfly species at risk.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/scien ... d=71987722
Genetically Engineered Crops Are Safe, Analysis Finds
Genetically engineered crops appear to be safe to eat and do not harm the environment, according to a comprehensive new analysis by the advisory group the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
However, it is somewhat unclear whether the technology has actually increased crop yields.
The report from the influential group, released on Tuesday, comes as the federal government is reviewing how it regulates biotech crops and as big packaged-food companies like Campbell Soup and General Mills are starting to label products as being made with genetically engineered ingredients to comply with a new Vermont law.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/busin ... d=71987722
Genetically engineered crops appear to be safe to eat and do not harm the environment, according to a comprehensive new analysis by the advisory group the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
However, it is somewhat unclear whether the technology has actually increased crop yields.
The report from the influential group, released on Tuesday, comes as the federal government is reviewing how it regulates biotech crops and as big packaged-food companies like Campbell Soup and General Mills are starting to label products as being made with genetically engineered ingredients to comply with a new Vermont law.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/busin ... d=71987722
Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation
CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.
In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/world ... 05309&_r=0
CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.
In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/world ... 05309&_r=0
Climate Change impose threat on grass food crops
According to a study published in the Royal Society Biology Letter Journal, projected climate change poses a huge threat to grass crops, including wheat, corn, rice and sorghum.
The study, published by an American team of researchers, say that the forecasted changes in climate by 2070 will occur so fast that the grass species will not be able to adapt in time. As a result, the species will not be able to survive, unless they are relocated to favorable environments.
The study, which reveals that food species will not be able to cope well with a rapidly heating earth, also show promise in developing “climate-proof” food crops for future generations.
According to study co-author John Wiens, from the University of Arizona, our best chance lies in finding genetic variations in wild relatives of the domesticated grass crops, which are less susceptible to the climate changes and have the ability to adapt faster.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/techandsc ... out#page=3
According to a study published in the Royal Society Biology Letter Journal, projected climate change poses a huge threat to grass crops, including wheat, corn, rice and sorghum.
The study, published by an American team of researchers, say that the forecasted changes in climate by 2070 will occur so fast that the grass species will not be able to adapt in time. As a result, the species will not be able to survive, unless they are relocated to favorable environments.
The study, which reveals that food species will not be able to cope well with a rapidly heating earth, also show promise in developing “climate-proof” food crops for future generations.
According to study co-author John Wiens, from the University of Arizona, our best chance lies in finding genetic variations in wild relatives of the domesticated grass crops, which are less susceptible to the climate changes and have the ability to adapt faster.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/techandsc ... out#page=3
Places around the world running out of water
With surging populations, the world is coping with the increased demand for water. A rapidly urbanizing population further strains the water supply. A report by the World Resources Institute ranks countries that face a high risk of their water resources running out by 2040. We take a look at some of these places that might run out of water soon.
Slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pla ... ailsignout
With surging populations, the world is coping with the increased demand for water. A rapidly urbanizing population further strains the water supply. A report by the World Resources Institute ranks countries that face a high risk of their water resources running out by 2040. We take a look at some of these places that might run out of water soon.
Slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pla ... ailsignout
Australia’s Lesson for a Thirsty California
Extract:
Yet the city averted catastrophe, in large part because residents responded to a campaign to use less water. Feldman argues that the experience offers lessons for water-stressed urban centers around the world.
Reducing water demand is often seen as a ‘‘soft’’ response to drought — less successful than big engineering projects. But Melbourne’s experience shows that helping residents (who use over 60 percent of the city’s water) and businesses to use less can be a “highly effective and relatively low cost” part of a city’s response. During the drought, domestic consumption dropped from 247 liters (65 gallons) per person per day in 2000-1 to 147 liters (39 gallons) in 2010-11 — enough to help save the city from running dry. Without water conservation, the reservoirs would have been empty by 2009, according to Melbourne Water.
How does a government persuade millions of people to nearly halve their water use? When the drought was declared, the state government of Victoria ordered Melbourne’s water companies to work together with it to quickly begin to formulate a joint response. The three water utilities and the water wholesaler are state-owned, and their cooperation was crucial to developing a response of this scale, Feldman said.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/opini ... dline&te=1
Extract:
Yet the city averted catastrophe, in large part because residents responded to a campaign to use less water. Feldman argues that the experience offers lessons for water-stressed urban centers around the world.
Reducing water demand is often seen as a ‘‘soft’’ response to drought — less successful than big engineering projects. But Melbourne’s experience shows that helping residents (who use over 60 percent of the city’s water) and businesses to use less can be a “highly effective and relatively low cost” part of a city’s response. During the drought, domestic consumption dropped from 247 liters (65 gallons) per person per day in 2000-1 to 147 liters (39 gallons) in 2010-11 — enough to help save the city from running dry. Without water conservation, the reservoirs would have been empty by 2009, according to Melbourne Water.
How does a government persuade millions of people to nearly halve their water use? When the drought was declared, the state government of Victoria ordered Melbourne’s water companies to work together with it to quickly begin to formulate a joint response. The three water utilities and the water wholesaler are state-owned, and their cooperation was crucial to developing a response of this scale, Feldman said.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/opini ... dline&te=1
Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops
LONDON — The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat.
But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.
The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.
Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/busin ... &te=1&_r=0
*****
Responses to the article above:
The Opinion Pages| Letters
Genetically Modified Crops: A Success Story, or Not?
Extract:
We misjudge genetic modification’s potential by considering just yield and pesticide use over 20 years.
“Fooling with nature” is nothing new: Crops are genetic variants of wild plants selected by humans over millenniums. Our latest tools include G.M. — allowing precision and wider choice of useful qualities. Given the challenge of global food security, it is foolish to overlook any new tool in the breeder’s toolbox.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
LONDON — The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat.
But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.
The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.
Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/busin ... &te=1&_r=0
*****
Responses to the article above:
The Opinion Pages| Letters
Genetically Modified Crops: A Success Story, or Not?
Extract:
We misjudge genetic modification’s potential by considering just yield and pesticide use over 20 years.
“Fooling with nature” is nothing new: Crops are genetic variants of wild plants selected by humans over millenniums. Our latest tools include G.M. — allowing precision and wider choice of useful qualities. Given the challenge of global food security, it is foolish to overlook any new tool in the breeder’s toolbox.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
With an Eye on Hunger, Scientists See Promise in Genetic Tinkering of Plants
URBANA, Ill. — A decade ago, agricultural scientists at the University of Illinois suggested a bold approach to improve the food supply: tinker with photosynthesis, the chemical reaction powering nearly all life on Earth.
The idea was greeted skeptically in scientific circles and ignored by funding agencies. But one outfit with deep pockets, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, eventually paid attention, hoping the research might help alleviate global poverty.
Now, after several years of work funded by the foundation, the scientists are reporting a remarkable result.
Using genetic engineering techniques to alter photosynthesis, they increased the productivity of a test plant — tobacco — by as much as 20 percent, they said Thursday in a study published by the journal Science. That is a huge number, given that plant breeders struggle to eke out gains of 1 or 2 percent with more conventional approaches.
The scientists have no interest in increasing the production of tobacco; their plan is to try the same alterations in food crops, and one of the leaders of the work believes production gains of 50 percent or more may ultimately be achievable. If that prediction is borne out in further research — it could take a decade, if not longer, to know for sure — the result might be nothing less than a transformation of global agriculture.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/scien ... 87722&_r=1
URBANA, Ill. — A decade ago, agricultural scientists at the University of Illinois suggested a bold approach to improve the food supply: tinker with photosynthesis, the chemical reaction powering nearly all life on Earth.
The idea was greeted skeptically in scientific circles and ignored by funding agencies. But one outfit with deep pockets, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, eventually paid attention, hoping the research might help alleviate global poverty.
Now, after several years of work funded by the foundation, the scientists are reporting a remarkable result.
Using genetic engineering techniques to alter photosynthesis, they increased the productivity of a test plant — tobacco — by as much as 20 percent, they said Thursday in a study published by the journal Science. That is a huge number, given that plant breeders struggle to eke out gains of 1 or 2 percent with more conventional approaches.
The scientists have no interest in increasing the production of tobacco; their plan is to try the same alterations in food crops, and one of the leaders of the work believes production gains of 50 percent or more may ultimately be achievable. If that prediction is borne out in further research — it could take a decade, if not longer, to know for sure — the result might be nothing less than a transformation of global agriculture.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/scien ... 87722&_r=1
A Blueprint for the Future of Food
Extract:
Wouldn’t it make more sense to cook with all that corn instead?
I tried. The problem, of course, is that field corn is just not delicious; it’s starchy and flavorless, not at all like the sweet corn Americans chain-saw through every summer. We aren’t really meant to be cooking with this stuff, which means we shouldn’t be planting it in the first place. In fact, you might say the same for many of the world’s crops: 36 percent of the planet’s crop calories are devoted to feeding livestock, according to a 2013 study.
What if we used those acres to plant beans, or any of the countless leguminous crops that help keep the soil healthy and fertile? And what if the next crop we planted was buckwheat or barley, for weed suppression, and then a Brassica like cabbage or cauliflower to break up disease cycles? More what ifs: What if we followed the Brassicas with a nonedible cover crop like clover, which would keep the soil nicely blanketed and replenish it with nutrients like carbon? What if, instead of bringing mountains of field corn to our cows, we brought our cows to the field and grazed them on the clover? (As one farmer told me, “Clover is like rocket fuel for ruminants.”) And what if we adapted these rotations region to region (and country to country), substituting in crops that best suited specific microclimates?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opini ... %2FTurning Points 2017&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Collection®ion=Marginalia&src=me&version=spotlight&pgtype=article
Extract:
Wouldn’t it make more sense to cook with all that corn instead?
I tried. The problem, of course, is that field corn is just not delicious; it’s starchy and flavorless, not at all like the sweet corn Americans chain-saw through every summer. We aren’t really meant to be cooking with this stuff, which means we shouldn’t be planting it in the first place. In fact, you might say the same for many of the world’s crops: 36 percent of the planet’s crop calories are devoted to feeding livestock, according to a 2013 study.
What if we used those acres to plant beans, or any of the countless leguminous crops that help keep the soil healthy and fertile? And what if the next crop we planted was buckwheat or barley, for weed suppression, and then a Brassica like cabbage or cauliflower to break up disease cycles? More what ifs: What if we followed the Brassicas with a nonedible cover crop like clover, which would keep the soil nicely blanketed and replenish it with nutrients like carbon? What if, instead of bringing mountains of field corn to our cows, we brought our cows to the field and grazed them on the clover? (As one farmer told me, “Clover is like rocket fuel for ruminants.”) And what if we adapted these rotations region to region (and country to country), substituting in crops that best suited specific microclimates?
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opini ... %2FTurning Points 2017&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Collection®ion=Marginalia&src=me&version=spotlight&pgtype=article