XUAN CANH, Vietnam: Truong Thi Nha stands just four and a half feet tall. Her three grown children tower over her, just as many young people in this village outside Hanoi dwarf their parents.
The biggest reason the children are so robust: fertilizer.
Nha, her face weathered beyond its 51 years, said her growth was stunted by a childhood of hunger and malnutrition. Just a few decades ago, crop yields here were far lower and diets much worse.
Then the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer.
Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertilizer, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture.
Some kinds of fertilizer have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors contributing to a rise in food prices that, according to the United Nations' World Food Program, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.
Protests over high food prices have erupted across the developing world, and the stability of governments from Senegal to the Philippines is threatened.
In the United States, farmers in Iowa eager to replenish nutrients in the soil have increased the age-old practice of spreading hog manure on fields. In India, the cost of subsidizing fertilizer for farmers has soared, leading to political dispute. And in Africa, plans to stave off hunger by increasing crop yields are suddenly in jeopardy.
The squeeze on the supply of fertilizer has been building for roughly five years. Rising demand for food and biofuels prompted farmers everywhere to plant more crops. As demand grew, the fertilizer mines and factories of the world proved unable to keep up.
Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply.
"If you want 10,000 tons, they'll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000," said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport, Iowa. "The rubber band is stretched really far."
Fertilizer companies are confident the shortage will be solved eventually, noting that they plan to build scores of new factories. But that will probably create fresh problems in the long run as the world grows more dependent on fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilizers. Intensified use of such fertilizers is certain to mean greater pollution of waterways, too.
Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertilizer. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertilizer is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields.
"Putting fertilizer on the ground on a one-acre plot can, in typical cases, raise an extra ton of output," said Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who has focused on eradicating poverty. "That's the difference between life and death."
The demand for fertilizer has been driven by a confluence of events, including population growth, shrinking world grain stocks and the appetite for corn and palm oil to make biofuel. But experts say the biggest factor has been the growing demand for food, especially meat, in the developing world.
Recently, Nha, the tiny Vietnamese woman, stood in a field outside her village, her weather-beaten face shielded from the drizzle by a big straw hat. She took a break from wielding her wood-handled hoe and described the meager diets of her youth.
Her family, including six brothers and sisters, struggled to survive on rations from the commune where they lived, eating little protein. The occasional pigs they raised on rice stalks and mush "fattened very slowly," Nha recalled.
But with market reforms, better seeds and increased fertilizer use, Vietnam's rice yields per acre have doubled and corn yields have tripled, allowing farmers to fatten a growing herd of livestock.
Several times a season, Nha and her neighbors walk down their rows of corn with battered metal buckets full of chemical fertilizer, which looks like coarse gray sand, sprinkling a bit at the base of each plant. Nha's husband, Le Van Son, remembers villagers' amazement in the 1990s when they learned that a pound of chemical fertilizer contained more of the major nutrients than 100 pounds of manure.
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30 April 2008
Climate change could force 1 billion from their homes by 2050
As many as one billion people could lose their homes by 2050 because of the devastating impact of global warming, scientists and political leaders will be warned today.
They will hear that the steady rise in temperatures across the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.
Hundreds of millions could be forced to go on the move because of water shortages and crop failures in most of Africa, as well as in central and southern Asia and South America, the conference in London will be told. There could also be an effect on levels of starvation and on food prices as agriculture struggles to cope with growing demand in increasingly arid conditions.
Rising sea levels could also cause havoc, with coastal communities in southern Asia, the Far East, the south Pacific islands and the Caribbean seeing their homes submerged.
North and west Africans could head towards Europe, while the southern border of the United States could come under renewed pressure from Central America.
The conference will hear a warning from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that the developed world should start preparing for a huge movement of people caused by climate change.
The event, which is being organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), will also be addressed by a Kenyan farmer and a United Nations worker based in Sudan. They will give first-hand accounts of previously fertile land that has already become parched in recent years as the desert spreads.
Craig Johnstone, the UNHCR deputy high commissioner, said yesterday that humanity faced a "global-scale emergency" whose effects would accumulate over the next four decades. He said it was impossible to forecast with confidence the numbers of people who would lose their homes through climate change. But he pointed to assessments of between 250 million and one billion people losing their homes by 2050. He said: "This will be a global-scale emergency, but ... it will take place gradually and over a long period of time."
Mr Johnstone rejected the suggestion that the industrialised West should shoulder the burden because it was to blame for much of climate change. But he said: "It's the obligation of the people who have the means to be helpful to help. They have an obligation to humanity to help."
He said the UNHCR already assisted in natural disasters such as earthquakes and the Asian tsunami of 2004 and added: "Perhaps even more challenging and more inevitable are the consequences of global changes."
Currently the status of refugees – defined as people escaping personal persecution by the state – is controlled by the Geneva Convention of 1951. The agreement, however, would not cover people who become homeless, or even stateless, because of changes to global weather patterns.
Pressure is therefore growing for the international community to reach a formal consensus on ways of dealing with the issue. Mr Johnstone said: "We're strongly in favour of there being adequate international mechanisms to cope."
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of migration at the IPPR, said: "The displacement of millions of people will be one of the most dramatic ways in which climate change will affect humankind."
Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, said a global agreement must be reached. "Climate change is the most serious long-term threat to development in poor countries, and if unchecked millions of people may be forced to migrate to escape the effects of drought, flooding, food shortages and rising sea levels," he said.
They will hear that the steady rise in temperatures across the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.
Hundreds of millions could be forced to go on the move because of water shortages and crop failures in most of Africa, as well as in central and southern Asia and South America, the conference in London will be told. There could also be an effect on levels of starvation and on food prices as agriculture struggles to cope with growing demand in increasingly arid conditions.
Rising sea levels could also cause havoc, with coastal communities in southern Asia, the Far East, the south Pacific islands and the Caribbean seeing their homes submerged.
North and west Africans could head towards Europe, while the southern border of the United States could come under renewed pressure from Central America.
The conference will hear a warning from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that the developed world should start preparing for a huge movement of people caused by climate change.
The event, which is being organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), will also be addressed by a Kenyan farmer and a United Nations worker based in Sudan. They will give first-hand accounts of previously fertile land that has already become parched in recent years as the desert spreads.
Craig Johnstone, the UNHCR deputy high commissioner, said yesterday that humanity faced a "global-scale emergency" whose effects would accumulate over the next four decades. He said it was impossible to forecast with confidence the numbers of people who would lose their homes through climate change. But he pointed to assessments of between 250 million and one billion people losing their homes by 2050. He said: "This will be a global-scale emergency, but ... it will take place gradually and over a long period of time."
Mr Johnstone rejected the suggestion that the industrialised West should shoulder the burden because it was to blame for much of climate change. But he said: "It's the obligation of the people who have the means to be helpful to help. They have an obligation to humanity to help."
He said the UNHCR already assisted in natural disasters such as earthquakes and the Asian tsunami of 2004 and added: "Perhaps even more challenging and more inevitable are the consequences of global changes."
Currently the status of refugees – defined as people escaping personal persecution by the state – is controlled by the Geneva Convention of 1951. The agreement, however, would not cover people who become homeless, or even stateless, because of changes to global weather patterns.
Pressure is therefore growing for the international community to reach a formal consensus on ways of dealing with the issue. Mr Johnstone said: "We're strongly in favour of there being adequate international mechanisms to cope."
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of migration at the IPPR, said: "The displacement of millions of people will be one of the most dramatic ways in which climate change will affect humankind."
Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, said a global agreement must be reached. "Climate change is the most serious long-term threat to development in poor countries, and if unchecked millions of people may be forced to migrate to escape the effects of drought, flooding, food shortages and rising sea levels," he said.
29 April 2008
'Silent' famine sweeps globe
Rice, fertilizer shortages, food costs, higher energy prices equal world crisisWASHINGTON – From India to Africa to North Korea to Pakistan and even in New York City, higher grain prices, fertilizer shortages and rising energy costs are combining to spell hunger for millions in what is being characterized as a global "silent famine."
Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the last year, escalating a trend that began in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent.
Last year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent.
"This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Program, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. "People are simply being priced out of food markets. ... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach."
Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the last year, escalating a trend that began in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent.
Last year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent.
"This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Program, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. "People are simply being priced out of food markets. ... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach."
The WFP launched a public appeal weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen by 55 percent since last June. By the time the appeal began last week, prices had risen a further 20 percent. That means WFP needs $700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices. The numbers are expected to continue to rise.
The crisis is widespread and the result of numerous causes – a kind of "perfect storm" leading to panic in many places:
In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields because thieves are stealing rice, now worth $600 a ton, right out of the paddies.
Four people were killed in Egypt in riots over subsidized flour that was being sold for profit on the black market.
There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.
Mexico's government is considering lifting a ban on genetically modified crops, to allow its farmers to compete with the United States.
Argentina, Kazakhstan and China have imposed restrictions to limit grain exports and keep more of their food at home.
Vietnam and India, both major rice exporters, have announced further restrictions on overseas sales.
Violent food protests hit Burkina Faso in February.
Protesters rallied in Indonesia recently, and media reported deaths by starvation.
In the Philippines, fast-food chains were urged to cut rice portions to counter a surge in prices.
Millions of people in India face starvation after a plague of rats overruns a region, as they do cyclically every 50 years.
Officials in Bangladesh warn of an emerging "silent famine" that threatens to ravage the region.
According to some experts, the worst damage is being done by government mandates and subsidies for "biofuels" that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. Thirty percent of this year's U.S. grain harvest will go to ethanol distilleries. The European Union, meanwhile, has set a goal of 10 percent bio-fuels for all transportation needs by 2010.
"A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people," writes Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist.
He notes that in six of the past seven years the human race has consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only 57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago.
One in four bushels of corn from this year's U.S. crop will be diverted to make ethanol, according to estimates.
"Turning food into fuel for cars is a major mistake on many fronts," said Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group based in Washington. "One, we're already seeing higher food prices in the American supermarket. Two, perhaps more serious from a global perspective, we're seeing higher food prices in developing countries where it's escalated as far as people rioting in the streets."
Palm oil is also at record prices because of biofuel demands. This has created shortages in Indonesia and Malaysia, where it is a staple.
Nevertheless, despite the recognition that the biofuels industry is adding to a global food crisis, the ethanol industry is popular in the U.S. where farmers enjoy subsidies for the corn crops.
Another contributing factor to the crisis is the demand for more meat in an increasingly prosperous Asia. More grain is used to feed the livestock than is required to feed humans directly in a traditional grain-based diet.
Bad weather is another problem driving the world's wheat stocks to a 30-year low – along with regional droughts and a declining dollar.
"This is an additional setback for the world economy, at a time when we are already going through major turbulence," Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Reuters. "But the biggest drama is the impact of higher food prices on the poor."
According to the organization, as well as the U.N., the price of corn could rise 27 percent in the next decade.
John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador to the U.S., predicts the current trend is the beginning of a 10-15 year rise in food costs worldwide.
The rodent plague in India occurs about every half century following the heavy flowering of a local species of bamboo, providing the rodents with a feast of high-protein foliage. Once the rats have ravaged the bamboo, they turn on the crops, consuming hundreds of tons of rice and corn supplies.
Survivors of the previous mautam, which heralded widespread famine in 1958, say they remember areas of paddy fields the size of four soccer fields being devastated overnight.
In Africa, rats are seen as part of the answer to the food shortage. According to Africa News, Karamojongs have resorted to hunting wild rats for survival as famine strikes the area.
Supplies of fertilizer are extremely tight on the worldwide market, contributing to a potential disaster scenario. The Scotsman reports there are virtually no stocks of ammonium nitrate in the United Kingdom.
Global nitrogen is currently in deficit, a situation that is unlikely to change for at least three years, the paper reports.
South Koreans are speculating, as they do annually, on how many North Koreans will starve to death before the fall harvest. But this year promises to be worse than usual.
Severe crop failure in the North and surging global prices for food will mean millions of hungry Koreans.
Roughly a third of children and mothers are malnourished, according to a recent U.N. study. The average 8-year-old in the North is 7 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than a South Korean child of the same age.
Floods last August ruined part of the main yearly harvest, creating a 25-percent shortfall in the food supply and putting 6 million people in need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Yesterday, the Hong Kong government tried to put a stop to panic-buying of rice in the city of 6.9 million as fears mounted over escalating prices and a global rice shortage. Shop shelves were being cleared of rice stocks as Hong Kong people reacted to news that the price of rice imported from Thailand had shot up by almost a third in the past week, according to agency reports.
Global food prices are even hitting home in New York City, according to a report in the Daily News. Food pantries and soup kitchens in the city are desperately low on staples for the area's poor and homeless.
The Food Bank for New York City, which supplies food to 1,000 agencies and 1.3 million people, calls it the worst problem since its founding 25 years ago.
Last year, the Food Bank received 17 million pounds of food through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, less than half of the 35 million pounds it received in 2002. And donations from individuals and corporations are also down about 50 percent, according to the report.
High gas prices, increased food production costs and a move to foreign production of American food are contributing to the problem
The crisis is widespread and the result of numerous causes – a kind of "perfect storm" leading to panic in many places:
In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields because thieves are stealing rice, now worth $600 a ton, right out of the paddies.
Four people were killed in Egypt in riots over subsidized flour that was being sold for profit on the black market.
There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.
Mexico's government is considering lifting a ban on genetically modified crops, to allow its farmers to compete with the United States.
Argentina, Kazakhstan and China have imposed restrictions to limit grain exports and keep more of their food at home.
Vietnam and India, both major rice exporters, have announced further restrictions on overseas sales.
Violent food protests hit Burkina Faso in February.
Protesters rallied in Indonesia recently, and media reported deaths by starvation.
In the Philippines, fast-food chains were urged to cut rice portions to counter a surge in prices.
Millions of people in India face starvation after a plague of rats overruns a region, as they do cyclically every 50 years.
Officials in Bangladesh warn of an emerging "silent famine" that threatens to ravage the region.
According to some experts, the worst damage is being done by government mandates and subsidies for "biofuels" that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. Thirty percent of this year's U.S. grain harvest will go to ethanol distilleries. The European Union, meanwhile, has set a goal of 10 percent bio-fuels for all transportation needs by 2010.
"A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people," writes Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist.
He notes that in six of the past seven years the human race has consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only 57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago.
One in four bushels of corn from this year's U.S. crop will be diverted to make ethanol, according to estimates.
"Turning food into fuel for cars is a major mistake on many fronts," said Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group based in Washington. "One, we're already seeing higher food prices in the American supermarket. Two, perhaps more serious from a global perspective, we're seeing higher food prices in developing countries where it's escalated as far as people rioting in the streets."
Palm oil is also at record prices because of biofuel demands. This has created shortages in Indonesia and Malaysia, where it is a staple.
Nevertheless, despite the recognition that the biofuels industry is adding to a global food crisis, the ethanol industry is popular in the U.S. where farmers enjoy subsidies for the corn crops.
Another contributing factor to the crisis is the demand for more meat in an increasingly prosperous Asia. More grain is used to feed the livestock than is required to feed humans directly in a traditional grain-based diet.
Bad weather is another problem driving the world's wheat stocks to a 30-year low – along with regional droughts and a declining dollar.
"This is an additional setback for the world economy, at a time when we are already going through major turbulence," Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Reuters. "But the biggest drama is the impact of higher food prices on the poor."
According to the organization, as well as the U.N., the price of corn could rise 27 percent in the next decade.
John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador to the U.S., predicts the current trend is the beginning of a 10-15 year rise in food costs worldwide.
The rodent plague in India occurs about every half century following the heavy flowering of a local species of bamboo, providing the rodents with a feast of high-protein foliage. Once the rats have ravaged the bamboo, they turn on the crops, consuming hundreds of tons of rice and corn supplies.
Survivors of the previous mautam, which heralded widespread famine in 1958, say they remember areas of paddy fields the size of four soccer fields being devastated overnight.
In Africa, rats are seen as part of the answer to the food shortage. According to Africa News, Karamojongs have resorted to hunting wild rats for survival as famine strikes the area.
Supplies of fertilizer are extremely tight on the worldwide market, contributing to a potential disaster scenario. The Scotsman reports there are virtually no stocks of ammonium nitrate in the United Kingdom.
Global nitrogen is currently in deficit, a situation that is unlikely to change for at least three years, the paper reports.
South Koreans are speculating, as they do annually, on how many North Koreans will starve to death before the fall harvest. But this year promises to be worse than usual.
Severe crop failure in the North and surging global prices for food will mean millions of hungry Koreans.
Roughly a third of children and mothers are malnourished, according to a recent U.N. study. The average 8-year-old in the North is 7 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than a South Korean child of the same age.
Floods last August ruined part of the main yearly harvest, creating a 25-percent shortfall in the food supply and putting 6 million people in need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Yesterday, the Hong Kong government tried to put a stop to panic-buying of rice in the city of 6.9 million as fears mounted over escalating prices and a global rice shortage. Shop shelves were being cleared of rice stocks as Hong Kong people reacted to news that the price of rice imported from Thailand had shot up by almost a third in the past week, according to agency reports.
Global food prices are even hitting home in New York City, according to a report in the Daily News. Food pantries and soup kitchens in the city are desperately low on staples for the area's poor and homeless.
The Food Bank for New York City, which supplies food to 1,000 agencies and 1.3 million people, calls it the worst problem since its founding 25 years ago.
Last year, the Food Bank received 17 million pounds of food through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, less than half of the 35 million pounds it received in 2002. And donations from individuals and corporations are also down about 50 percent, according to the report.
High gas prices, increased food production costs and a move to foreign production of American food are contributing to the problem
20 children dead, 1,200 sickened by infection in eastern China
BEIJING (AP) — A viral outbreak in eastern China has sickened almost 1,200 children, killing 20 of them, health officials said Monday.
Enterovirus 71 infections were discovered in March in Fuyang, a city in Anhui province, but may have gone undetected for a while because the symptoms appeared to be ailments common in children, said Feng Lizhong, an official at the Anhui public health bureau.
Hospitals in Fuyang started to take in patients with fever, blisters, ulcers in the mouth, or a rash on their hands and feet, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Most were under 2 years old and none was older than 6, Xinhua said.
There were 1,199 reported cases between early March and Sunday, 20 of which were fatal, the health bureau said in a statement on its Web site.
Some 371 children were still being treated and more than 550 had recovered, it said.
It was not immediately clear what triggered the outbreak, but the bureau said it is the season when the virus is prevalent.
Enterovirus 71 is one of several viruses that cause hand, foot and mouth disease, which is characterized by fever, mouth sores and a rash with blisters. It is spread by direct contact with nose and throat discharges, saliva, fluid from blisters, or the stool of infected persons.
The illness mainly strikes children below age 10 and is not related to foot and mouth disease, which infects cattle, sheep and swine.
The World Health Organization's Beijing office said there didn't appear to be an epidemiological link among the cases although most of the children lived in rural areas.
"We believe the situation is still of concern, especially because of the current high reported case fatality rate compared to previous years," said Dr. Cris Tunon, the acting China representative.
The number of cases of hand, foot and mouth has been on the rise in China.
Last year, Beijing reported more than 1,000 cases in the first six months. In the eastern province of Shandong, 1,200 children were infected in May.
Enterovirus 71 infections were discovered in March in Fuyang, a city in Anhui province, but may have gone undetected for a while because the symptoms appeared to be ailments common in children, said Feng Lizhong, an official at the Anhui public health bureau.
Hospitals in Fuyang started to take in patients with fever, blisters, ulcers in the mouth, or a rash on their hands and feet, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Most were under 2 years old and none was older than 6, Xinhua said.
There were 1,199 reported cases between early March and Sunday, 20 of which were fatal, the health bureau said in a statement on its Web site.
Some 371 children were still being treated and more than 550 had recovered, it said.
It was not immediately clear what triggered the outbreak, but the bureau said it is the season when the virus is prevalent.
Enterovirus 71 is one of several viruses that cause hand, foot and mouth disease, which is characterized by fever, mouth sores and a rash with blisters. It is spread by direct contact with nose and throat discharges, saliva, fluid from blisters, or the stool of infected persons.
The illness mainly strikes children below age 10 and is not related to foot and mouth disease, which infects cattle, sheep and swine.
The World Health Organization's Beijing office said there didn't appear to be an epidemiological link among the cases although most of the children lived in rural areas.
"We believe the situation is still of concern, especially because of the current high reported case fatality rate compared to previous years," said Dr. Cris Tunon, the acting China representative.
The number of cases of hand, foot and mouth has been on the rise in China.
Last year, Beijing reported more than 1,000 cases in the first six months. In the eastern province of Shandong, 1,200 children were infected in May.
World food crisis turns rice into gold
Farmer Soonton Wananpruek cuts his rice during a harvest of the field in central Thailand.Richard Lloyd Parry in Khao Ngam
Until a few months ago, Booncherd Leekasem would never have been caught astride a muddy tractor or squelching through buffalo dung in a rice paddy. As a headman of Khao Ngam in central Thailand he had far more respectable things to attend to, such as organising village affairs and running the restaurant where his wife serves her famous crispy catfish salad.
Mr Booncherd rented his 14 hectares (35 acres) of land to poor relatives and let them endure the backbreaking labour of planting, weeding and harvesting the rice. This year all that has changed and now Mr Booncherd gladly spends his days in the fields beneath the tropical sun. “In the past, when kids in school were asked what their father did, they would be ashamed to say, ‘He is a farmer’,” he says. “But now being a farmer is nothing to be ashamed of — we can be proud of what we do.”
All over the country, Thais are returning to the paddies like prospectors chasing gold. After a global surge in the price of grain, a gruelling, unglamorous occupation has become highly lucrative. The economic opportunities have also brought risks as farmers get deeper into debt, fight over scarce water resources and are forced to defend their fields from a new breed of rice bandit.
Thailand’s 20 million farmers find themselves at the centre of an unprecedented surge in global food prices — a “silent tsunami”, in the words of the UN World Food Programme — that is threatening starvation for millions
Its causes are multiple. A newly affluent middle class in countries such as China and India is increasing demand for food at a time when more and more crops are being diverted toenvironmentally friendly biofuels. A series of natural disasters, from droughts in Australia to floods in North Korea and cyclones in Bangladesh, have ruined harvests and further reduced food stocks.
As prices have risen, there have been riots and protests in 33 countries, from Haiti to the Philippines. To keep rice affordable in local markets, big producers such as Vietnam and India have restricted exports — further driving up the international price. In Thailand, the world’s biggest exporter, the result has been a rice bonanza.
A year ago, a tonne of Thai Grade B rice sold for $325 (£164); last week, the rate was $960 and climbing. Rice farming has become three times more lucrative, and rice farmers are galloping to cash in. Fields that have lain fallow are being ploughed and planted; in wet and fertile central Thailand, where Mr Booncherd lives, farmers are contemplating three or even four harvests a year, beyond the usual one or two.
The boom is not bringing uncomplicated happiness, however. Mr Booncherd has been engaged in a bitter dispute with neighbours about access to water, solved only after investing in expensive new pumps to draw in supplies from a distant canal.
If rice is now more expensive, so are the fertiliser and insecticide that farmers use to nurture and protect it and the fuel for tractors and harvesting machines. In any case, the grain passes through the hands of several middlemen — traders, millers and exporters — who all take their cut before it is sold at the international market price.
And the preciousness of the commodity has created fears of rice bandits marauding the fields by night. Daourieng Kitsamit, a farmer in Ayutthaya province, had 63 buckets of seed rice stolen from his fields. Thai police are laying on night-time patrols and farmers have formed village militias.
As long as the price is going up, these risks will be handsomely outweighed by profits, but if Thailand were to resort to its own export restrictions, local prices would fall, burdening farmers with debt. If that happens, Mr Booncherd will be glad of his restaurant and his wife’s spicy catfish.
Cooking the books
— 40% The increase in world rice consumption in the past 30 years from 62kg (136lbs) per person to 86kg (190lbs)
— 225million The number of people —- roughly the population if Indonesia — who could be fed for a year by the six per cent of Asia's rice production that is lost to rats annually
— 33% The number of food shortages that it is believed could be alleviated by better connecting small farmers to markets
— 2000 Vietnam's rice yield was nearly twice that of Thailand that year
— 200kg a year is the highest per capita rice consumption in the world, a record held by Burma
Sources: Rice Today, UN, Times database
As prices have risen, there have been riots and protests in 33 countries, from Haiti to the Philippines. To keep rice affordable in local markets, big producers such as Vietnam and India have restricted exports — further driving up the international price. In Thailand, the world’s biggest exporter, the result has been a rice bonanza.
A year ago, a tonne of Thai Grade B rice sold for $325 (£164); last week, the rate was $960 and climbing. Rice farming has become three times more lucrative, and rice farmers are galloping to cash in. Fields that have lain fallow are being ploughed and planted; in wet and fertile central Thailand, where Mr Booncherd lives, farmers are contemplating three or even four harvests a year, beyond the usual one or two.
The boom is not bringing uncomplicated happiness, however. Mr Booncherd has been engaged in a bitter dispute with neighbours about access to water, solved only after investing in expensive new pumps to draw in supplies from a distant canal.
If rice is now more expensive, so are the fertiliser and insecticide that farmers use to nurture and protect it and the fuel for tractors and harvesting machines. In any case, the grain passes through the hands of several middlemen — traders, millers and exporters — who all take their cut before it is sold at the international market price.
And the preciousness of the commodity has created fears of rice bandits marauding the fields by night. Daourieng Kitsamit, a farmer in Ayutthaya province, had 63 buckets of seed rice stolen from his fields. Thai police are laying on night-time patrols and farmers have formed village militias.
As long as the price is going up, these risks will be handsomely outweighed by profits, but if Thailand were to resort to its own export restrictions, local prices would fall, burdening farmers with debt. If that happens, Mr Booncherd will be glad of his restaurant and his wife’s spicy catfish.
Cooking the books
— 40% The increase in world rice consumption in the past 30 years from 62kg (136lbs) per person to 86kg (190lbs)
— 225million The number of people —- roughly the population if Indonesia — who could be fed for a year by the six per cent of Asia's rice production that is lost to rats annually
— 33% The number of food shortages that it is believed could be alleviated by better connecting small farmers to markets
— 2000 Vietnam's rice yield was nearly twice that of Thailand that year
— 200kg a year is the highest per capita rice consumption in the world, a record held by Burma
Sources: Rice Today, UN, Times database
Rice harvest shortages forecast troubled times ahead
The rice market is a good indicator for the political stability of Asia, Jonathan Pincus, the chief economist of the UN in Vietnam, told The Times. Since the new year Asian rice prices have trebled and in some local markets they have risen tenfold in the past year. With staples such as wheat also surging, the World Bank, for one, says it does not believe there will be any moderation in global food prices until 2010 and that 33 countries face the prospect of civil unrest.
In India and China, the biggest consumers of rice, politicians grown used to trumpeting their economies’ explosive growth have been wrongfooted. The rice price spike has taken governments by surprise even though the conditions behind it have been festering for years.
Most of the rice crops in the world are consumed by the countries that produce them, which means that the global trade in the commodity is thin. In an average year more rice is eaten by rats in Asia (as much as 17 per cent of the crop in some countries) than is traded across the world (about 6 per cent). Because of the small volumes the world market is prone to violent swings.
According to US officials global stocks were at a 25-year low this year, which means that the smallest of shocks has had an even larger effect on prices. And there have been shocks. In India, amid a dearth of investment, agricultural productivity growth has ground to a halt and now lags behind population growth. In China, where factories have replaced vast areas of paddy fields, a cold winter raised concerns about harvests.
A six-year drought hit the Australian crop and the International Rice Research Institute gave warning of pest problems in Vietnam, a key exporter. Several countries have banned exports, piling more pressure on global supplies. Last month the Philippines, a country facing shortages, could not find enough rice. Traders offered to sell the nation 325,000 tonnes when it wanted 550,000 tonnes. The average price, of nearly $680 (£343) a tonne, was up more than 40 per cent from January.
The head of the World Food Programme, which is feeding the equivalent of the population of Britain, wrote to the rich nations last month to plead for emergency funds. The body, responsible for providing for the poorest people in the world, estimated it needed an extra $500 million. By the time the letter was delivered — three weeks later — its food bill had risen by a fifth.
In India and China, the biggest consumers of rice, politicians grown used to trumpeting their economies’ explosive growth have been wrongfooted. The rice price spike has taken governments by surprise even though the conditions behind it have been festering for years.
Most of the rice crops in the world are consumed by the countries that produce them, which means that the global trade in the commodity is thin. In an average year more rice is eaten by rats in Asia (as much as 17 per cent of the crop in some countries) than is traded across the world (about 6 per cent). Because of the small volumes the world market is prone to violent swings.
According to US officials global stocks were at a 25-year low this year, which means that the smallest of shocks has had an even larger effect on prices. And there have been shocks. In India, amid a dearth of investment, agricultural productivity growth has ground to a halt and now lags behind population growth. In China, where factories have replaced vast areas of paddy fields, a cold winter raised concerns about harvests.
A six-year drought hit the Australian crop and the International Rice Research Institute gave warning of pest problems in Vietnam, a key exporter. Several countries have banned exports, piling more pressure on global supplies. Last month the Philippines, a country facing shortages, could not find enough rice. Traders offered to sell the nation 325,000 tonnes when it wanted 550,000 tonnes. The average price, of nearly $680 (£343) a tonne, was up more than 40 per cent from January.
The head of the World Food Programme, which is feeding the equivalent of the population of Britain, wrote to the rich nations last month to plead for emergency funds. The body, responsible for providing for the poorest people in the world, estimated it needed an extra $500 million. By the time the letter was delivered — three weeks later — its food bill had risen by a fifth.
3 tornadoes rip through Va., hundreds of people hurt
SUFFOLK, Va. (AP) — Three tornadoes ripped through Virginia on Monday, with one hop-scotching across the southeastern part of the state and leaving behind a 25-mile trail of smashed homes, tossed cars and more than 200 injured residents.The twister in this city outside Norfolk cut a fickle, zig-zagging path through neighborhoods, obliterating some homes and spraying splintered wood across lawns while leaving those standing just a few feet away untouched.
Buses took residents to safety, steering clear of downed power lines, tree limbs and a confetti of debris.
Insulation, wiring and twisted metal hung from the front of a mall that was stripped bare of its facing. At another store, the tin roof was rolled up like a sardine can. Some of the cars and SUVs in the parking lot laid on top of others.
"It's just a bunch of broken power poles, telephone lines and sad faces," said Richard Allbright, who works for a tree removal service in Driver and had been out for hours trying to clear the roads.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine declared a state of emergency for the areas of southeastern Virginia struck by the twisters.
The National Weather Service confirmed that tornadoes struck Suffolk, Colonial Heights and Brunswick County. Meteorologist Bryan Jackson described Suffolk's as a "major tornado."
Jackson said the Brunswick County tornado was estimated at 86 mph to 110 mph, and cut a 300-yard path of destruction.
The first tornado touched down around 1 p.m. in Brunswick County, said Mike Rusnak, a weather service meteorologist in Wakefield. The second struck Colonial Heights around 3:40 p.m., he said.
The third touched down multiple times, between 4:30 to 5 p.m., and is believed to have caused damage over a 25-mile path from Suffolk to Norfolk, Rusnak said.
At least 200 were injured in Suffolk and 18 others were injured in Colonial Heights, south of Richmond, said Bob Spieldenner from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
In Colonial Heights, the storm overturned cars and damaged buildings in the Southpark Mall area.
Suffolk city spokeswoman Dana Woodson said the area around Sentara Obici Hospital and in the community of Driver, located within the city, were hardest hit. The hospital was damaged but still able to treat patients.
Several of Gregory A. Parker's businesses and his pre-Civil War-era home in Driver were damaged.
The porch was blown off his Arthur's General Store. At another store he owns, the tin roof was rolled up like a sardine can. The facade of his home collapsed and the windows were blown out. Inside, furniture was tossed about.
"I hate to say it sounded like a train, but that's the truth," Parker said.
His wife, Ellise, rode out the storm in the first-floor bathroom of another antique store. The building lost its second story.
Parker is spending the night with his sister, who lives nearby.
"I don't even think a leaf blew off at her house. That's how tornadoes are," he said.
At King's Fork High School, about 65 people took shelter for the night. Many of them watched coverage of the storms on television as volunteers set up cots in the gymnasium.
Keith Godwin lives in one of the hardest hit neighborhood. He, his wife and two kids took shelter in the bathroom of their home after he saw the funnel cloud from his window.
Their home is fine except for some debris. Those across the street were badly damaged, including two houses completely wiped off their foundations and one that was tossed on top of another home.
"All that's left is a concrete slab," Godwin said.
Chris Jones, a former Suffolk mayor, said area residents stopped by the high school throughout the night to donate bottled water, toothpaste, deodorant and other needed items.
"It could have been much worse," Jones said. "It's been amazing the people who have come out to help tonight."
Sentara hospital spokesman Dale Gauding said about 70 injured people were being treated there. Three were admitted and were in fair condition.
"We have lots of cuts and bruises" and arm and leg injuries, he said. The hospital's windows were cracked, apparently by debris from a damaged shopping center across the street.
Southside Regional Medical Center treated one storm victim with minor injuries and was poised to receive more, hospital spokeswoman Terry Tysinger said.
Property damage also was reported in Brunswick County, one of several localities where the weather service had issued a tornado warning. Sgt. Michelle Cotten of the Virginia State Police said a twister destroyed two homes. Trees and power lines were down, and some flooding was reported.
About 5,500 Dominion Virginia Power customers remained without service Monday night, mostly in the Northern Neck.
Laura Southard, a state emergency management spokeswoman, said the damage assessment will be done Tuesday.
Corn Futures Advance to Record as Weather Delays U.S. Planting
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Corn futures in Chicago climbed to a record on supply concerns after a government report showed farmers in the U.S., the world's biggest producer, had planted only half as much as a year ago because of cold, wet weather.About 10 percent of the corn crop was planted in the top 18 producing states as of April 27, compared with 4 percent a week earlier and 20 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said yesterday. Over the past five years, the average for the date has been 35 percent.
Sowing delays and rising prices may worsen global food shortages that have prompted rice export curbs by Egypt, India and Vietnam and driven wheat, rice and soybeans to records this year. The U.S. government has already forecast a drop in corn acreage and later planting may further hurt production.
``The USDA report is very bullish for corn,'' said Nicholas Chung, senior manager at Korea Development Bank in Seoul. More delays may drive U.S. farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
Corn for July delivery rose as much as 10.5 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $6.24 a bushel in after-hours electronic trading on the Chicago Board of Trade and stood at $6.21 at 4:36 p.m. Singapore time. The most-active corn contract gained 69 percent in the past year on record demand for animal feed and biofuels.
``In the U.S., there's a lot of flooding in the southern states and it's causing a delay to the corn plantings,'' Simon Roberts, head of agricultural commodities at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., told Bloomberg Television from Sydney today. ``When that occurs, it puts back the pollination growth cycles slightly.''
Acreage Drop
The U.S. is the biggest exporter of corn. The USDA March 31 forecast an 8.1 percent drop in corn planting this year to 86.014 million acres, as farmers sowed more soybeans and wheat.
The yield potential for corn declines unless seeds are sown before the end of April in the southern Midwest or by the middle of May in the rest of the region, because plants need to pollinate before the arrival of hot summer weather. Planting of soybeans usually begins in early May.
Soybeans for July delivery were down 3.25 cents at $12.9425 a bushel at 4:39 p.m. Singapore time after trading between $12.87 and $13.0875. The contract fell 3 percent yesterday on speculation the corn crop planting delays will force some farmers to switch from corn.
Soybeans have surged 78 percent in the past year, reaching a record $15.8625 on March 3, after U.S. farmers last year planted the lowest area in more than a decade.
Wheat for July delivery was down 3 cents, 0.4 percent, at $8.380 a bushel at 4:41 p.m. Singapore time. The contract gained 3.1 percent yesterday. Futures are still up 73 percent in the past year, reaching a record $13.495 a bushel on Feb. 27.
About 46 percent of the winter-wheat crop was in good or excellent condition as of April 27, compared with 45 percent a week earlier and 56 percent a year earlier, the USDA said.
In the export market, South Korea bought 20,800 tons of U.S. wheat at a tender today.
Rough rice for July delivery fell as much as 74.5 cents, or 3.2 percent, to $22.935 per 100 pounds and stood at $23.115 at 4:27 p.m. Singapore time. Rice has more than doubled in the past year as China, Vietnam and Egypt curbed sales to safeguard domestic reserves, reaching a record $25.07 on April 24.
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Corn futures in Chicago climbed to a record on supply concerns after a government report showed farmers in the U.S., the world's biggest producer, had planted only half as much as a year ago because of cold, wet weather.
About 10 percent of the corn crop was planted in the top 18 producing states as of April 27, compared with 4 percent a week earlier and 20 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said yesterday. Over the past five years, the average for the date has been 35 percent.
Sowing delays and rising prices may worsen global food shortages that have prompted rice export curbs by Egypt, India and Vietnam and driven wheat, rice and soybeans to records this year. The U.S. government has already forecast a drop in corn acreage and later planting may further hurt production.
``The USDA report is very bullish for corn,'' said Nicholas Chung, senior manager at Korea Development Bank in Seoul. More delays may drive U.S. farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
Corn for July delivery rose as much as 10.5 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $6.24 a bushel in after-hours electronic trading on the Chicago Board of Trade and stood at $6.21 at 4:36 p.m. Singapore time. The most-active corn contract gained 69 percent in the past year on record demand for animal feed and biofuels.
``In the U.S., there's a lot of flooding in the southern states and it's causing a delay to the corn plantings,'' Simon Roberts, head of agricultural commodities at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., told Bloomberg Television from Sydney today. ``When that occurs, it puts back the pollination growth cycles slightly.''
Acreage Drop
The U.S. is the biggest exporter of corn. The USDA March 31 forecast an 8.1 percent drop in corn planting this year to 86.014 million acres, as farmers sowed more soybeans and wheat.
The yield potential for corn declines unless seeds are sown before the end of April in the southern Midwest or by the middle of May in the rest of the region, because plants need to pollinate before the arrival of hot summer weather. Planting of soybeans usually begins in early May.
Soybeans for July delivery were down 3.25 cents at $12.9425 a bushel at 4:39 p.m. Singapore time after trading between $12.87 and $13.0875. The contract fell 3 percent yesterday on speculation the corn crop planting delays will force some farmers to switch from corn.
Soybeans have surged 78 percent in the past year, reaching a record $15.8625 on March 3, after U.S. farmers last year planted the lowest area in more than a decade.
Wheat for July delivery was down 3 cents, 0.4 percent, at $8.380 a bushel at 4:41 p.m. Singapore time. The contract gained 3.1 percent yesterday. Futures are still up 73 percent in the past year, reaching a record $13.495 a bushel on Feb. 27.
About 46 percent of the winter-wheat crop was in good or excellent condition as of April 27, compared with 45 percent a week earlier and 56 percent a year earlier, the USDA said.
In the export market, South Korea bought 20,800 tons of U.S. wheat at a tender today.
Rough rice for July delivery fell as much as 74.5 cents, or 3.2 percent, to $22.935 per 100 pounds and stood at $23.115 at 4:27 p.m. Singapore time. Rice has more than doubled in the past year as China, Vietnam and Egypt curbed sales to safeguard domestic reserves, reaching a record $25.07 on April 24.
Mississippi River flooding dooms farmers
REDWOOD, Miss. - Farmers here are experiencing water torture as they wait for the flooded Mississippi River to recede and give them a chance to salvage what's left of what might have been the best season in memory.
The muddy Mississippi is at levels not seen in more than three decades, putting hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland under water. It's impossible to gauge overall agricultural losses at this point, federal and state officials say, but most agree the cost will be expensive and the damage extensive.
At Pig Willie's barbecue joint, a cinderblock and cement floor affair attached to a gas station along Highway 61 as the blacktop begins its long, flat run through the Delta, independent farmers recently gathered for lunch and to share their blues.
The muddy Mississippi is at levels not seen in more than three decades, putting hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland under water. It's impossible to gauge overall agricultural losses at this point, federal and state officials say, but most agree the cost will be expensive and the damage extensive.
At Pig Willie's barbecue joint, a cinderblock and cement floor affair attached to a gas station along Highway 61 as the blacktop begins its long, flat run through the Delta, independent farmers recently gathered for lunch and to share their blues.
"Right here in this room it will cost over $1 million," Karsten Simrall said of the difficulties facing farmers. They are wagering potential profits offered by some of the richest soil in the country against the whims of the mercurial Mississippi.
"It'll take us five years to get out of this. It's going to put people out of business," Simrall said. "There's no telling what's going to happen."
The river has not reached this level — about 7 feet above flood stage — since 1973.
855,750 acres swampedThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says a total of 855,750 acres are under either Mississippi floodwater or backwater from the Yazoo River, which drains much of the board-flat Mississippi Delta into the Mississippi River. About 273,000 of those flooded acres are cleared for wheat, cotton, soybeans, corn and other crops.
Simrall recently knocked a hole in a levee his family built more than a century ago to protect their land north of Vicksburg. After failing to keep water out, he feared it will keep in receding floodwaters.
The flood hit just as farmers were preparing to harvest wheat and plant corn, soybeans and cotton. Some, like farmer Brad Bradway, were forced to watch as water crept inch by inch over his 110 acres of wheat until his fields sat under 8 feet of water.
Others are now stuck waiting for the water to recede and the ground to dry before they can plant, guaranteeing a shortened growing season, yield reductions and lower returns. This comes after a drought has left much of the region parched for several years.
"At one point I had 300 acres under water and 240 acres too dry to plant," Bradway said. "What's wrong with this picture?"
Weather is just part of the problem.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP
"It'll take us five years to get out of this. It's going to put people out of business," says farmer Karsten Simrall.
Input costs such as fuel and fertilizer have risen dramatically in just a few months. Diesel around Vicksburg costs more than $4 a gallon — or more than $100 per tank for the ubiquitous diesel pickup — and fertilizer that went for $68 an acre last season now runs $100.
Simrall planted 1,700 acres of corn that was about a foot tall when floodwaters covered 1,200 of those acres. He's out $120,000 already and doesn't know if the Mississippi River will recede fast enough for him to salvage that acreage.
He's not alone. The flood has taken not only money farmers invested in the field, but much of the profit they expected. Worse, most sold their crops in advance to take advantage of prices so high few could resist.
Bradway sold 1,000 bushels of winter wheat to a distributor for $7 a bushel. When the flood took his crop, he was still on the hook. So he paid $10.50 a bushel to another distributor for wheat to satisfy his contract. He hopes to turn a profit on soybeans this summer.
Looking for 'exit strategy'"I'm trying to design an exit strategy because I'm tired of it," Bradway said.
The farmers believe there's a simple solution to the flooding.
The Environmental Protection Agency is threatening to veto the Yazoo Backwater project that would pump excess water out of the Yazoo River wetlands during floods. Critics say the project will hurt the environment and threaten endangered species.
The veto would break a promise farmers and many area residents believe was made to them when the corps begin to harness the Mississippi with a massive levee system. While the levees keep the river in check, they say much of the benefit is upstream and at their expense.
A corps spokesman says if the Yazoo project were in place, it would have pumped about 4 feet of water off currently flooded land. That would have made quite the difference for Mississippi farmers who work inside the levee system.
Bradway has farmed the same 1,000 acres for three decades. He's had floods big and small in 14 of those 30 years.
This latest, greatest flood cost him $25,000 out of pocket and $45,000 in potential earnings. He wonders if this flood could be the last for Sherman's Defeat Plantation, the site of the Union scourge's only loss during the Civil War.
"I'm trying to keep it from becoming Bradway's Defeat," he said.
"It'll take us five years to get out of this. It's going to put people out of business," Simrall said. "There's no telling what's going to happen."
The river has not reached this level — about 7 feet above flood stage — since 1973.
855,750 acres swampedThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says a total of 855,750 acres are under either Mississippi floodwater or backwater from the Yazoo River, which drains much of the board-flat Mississippi Delta into the Mississippi River. About 273,000 of those flooded acres are cleared for wheat, cotton, soybeans, corn and other crops.
Simrall recently knocked a hole in a levee his family built more than a century ago to protect their land north of Vicksburg. After failing to keep water out, he feared it will keep in receding floodwaters.
The flood hit just as farmers were preparing to harvest wheat and plant corn, soybeans and cotton. Some, like farmer Brad Bradway, were forced to watch as water crept inch by inch over his 110 acres of wheat until his fields sat under 8 feet of water.
Others are now stuck waiting for the water to recede and the ground to dry before they can plant, guaranteeing a shortened growing season, yield reductions and lower returns. This comes after a drought has left much of the region parched for several years.
"At one point I had 300 acres under water and 240 acres too dry to plant," Bradway said. "What's wrong with this picture?"
Weather is just part of the problem.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP
"It'll take us five years to get out of this. It's going to put people out of business," says farmer Karsten Simrall.
Input costs such as fuel and fertilizer have risen dramatically in just a few months. Diesel around Vicksburg costs more than $4 a gallon — or more than $100 per tank for the ubiquitous diesel pickup — and fertilizer that went for $68 an acre last season now runs $100.
Simrall planted 1,700 acres of corn that was about a foot tall when floodwaters covered 1,200 of those acres. He's out $120,000 already and doesn't know if the Mississippi River will recede fast enough for him to salvage that acreage.
He's not alone. The flood has taken not only money farmers invested in the field, but much of the profit they expected. Worse, most sold their crops in advance to take advantage of prices so high few could resist.
Bradway sold 1,000 bushels of winter wheat to a distributor for $7 a bushel. When the flood took his crop, he was still on the hook. So he paid $10.50 a bushel to another distributor for wheat to satisfy his contract. He hopes to turn a profit on soybeans this summer.
Looking for 'exit strategy'"I'm trying to design an exit strategy because I'm tired of it," Bradway said.
The farmers believe there's a simple solution to the flooding.
The Environmental Protection Agency is threatening to veto the Yazoo Backwater project that would pump excess water out of the Yazoo River wetlands during floods. Critics say the project will hurt the environment and threaten endangered species.
The veto would break a promise farmers and many area residents believe was made to them when the corps begin to harness the Mississippi with a massive levee system. While the levees keep the river in check, they say much of the benefit is upstream and at their expense.
A corps spokesman says if the Yazoo project were in place, it would have pumped about 4 feet of water off currently flooded land. That would have made quite the difference for Mississippi farmers who work inside the levee system.
Bradway has farmed the same 1,000 acres for three decades. He's had floods big and small in 14 of those 30 years.
This latest, greatest flood cost him $25,000 out of pocket and $45,000 in potential earnings. He wonders if this flood could be the last for Sherman's Defeat Plantation, the site of the Union scourge's only loss during the Civil War.
"I'm trying to keep it from becoming Bradway's Defeat," he said.
24 April 2008
Global Food Crisis Raises Hunger Fears
Recently, the crisis on the world's financial markets seemed the worst headache of the global economy. But now the threat of a food crisis is mounting with every passing day.
This crisis is much more vital for every human being, and it may become much more dangerous than financial cataclysms, because it may provoke a social uproar on a global scale. International organizations are already sending urgent relief to the poorest countries in order to prevent food riots. But it is unlikely that anyone can offer a long-term solution to this problem now.
Both the financial and food crises have been triggered by the excessive economic optimism of experts in the last few years, and their inability to predict global challenges. From the start of this century, the world economy was growing at a high rate. Incomes were confidently rising against this background, especially in such huge and rapidly growing markets as China and India. But higher incomes provoked a sharp increase in prices on all kinds of raw materials, including sources of energy, which are part of the cost of practically any product, including agricultural produce. Thus, in the past year prices on hydrocarbons have gone up by 60 percent, while rice and wheat prices have doubled. Eventually, these factors brought about a sharp price hike on food products, which started last year, and continues to this day.
The bad situation is made worse by the fact that for many years huge resources have been invested into the production of biofuels in order to prevent an energy crisis. Their production is fairly expensive, and is not always justified economically. Moreover, it is withdrawing considerable resources from the food market, thereby making food even more expensive.
Unable to afford increasingly expensive food, the poorest people, primarily in countries with backward economies, are struggling for survival. In the World Bank's estimate, rocketing global food prices have set back the fight against poverty by seven years.
Large-scale poverty is fraught with social explosions. A wave of massive unrest caused by the growth of food prices has swept Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Mauritania, Madagascar, and Ethiopia in Africa alone. There are hunger riots on Haiti in the Caribbean, and in the Philippines in South-East Asia. Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf, predicts new hunger riots in many Asian countries as well, including food producers.
The fact that world leaders have realized the scale of the problem and are ready to act without delay, just as in the case of the financial crisis, is the only cause for optimism.
Speaking in New York on April 14, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: "The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions... We need not only short-term emergency measures to meet urgent critical needs and avert starvation in many regions across the world, but also a significant increase in long-term productivity in food grain production."
President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick has also called for urgent measures to curb soaring food prices and prevent hunger. He emphasized that skyrocketing prices will be one of the main topics for discussion by G8 ministers of finance in Tokyo, adding: "But, frankly speaking, the G8 meeting is in June and we cannot wait for that. We have to put our money where our mouth is now - so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that."
Urgent measures are already being taken. The World Bank is sending $10 million to fight hunger in Haiti. In Zoellick's estimate, $500 million should be earmarked to the poorest countries before May 1, 2008 for this purpose. Concerned over massive unrest in the world, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered $200 million in immediate aid to the poorest nations through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
As for long-term measures to combat poverty, the situation is rather vague. It is obvious that to reduce food prices agricultural production has to be increased, primarily in the poorest countries. But advice on how to do this is couched in general terms. Ban Ki-moon stressed the need to give emerging economies access to resources, investment and technologies. But such appeals have been made for more than a decade, and nothing has changed.
Against the background of urgent international relief to prevent the poor from dying all over the world, some members of the Russian government maintain Olympian calm. This is surprising, considering that about 15 percent of the population in Russia is living beneath the poverty line.
Speaking at the session of the WB and IMF Development Committee in Washington on April 13, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin merely expressed apprehensions over soaring food prices. He said that they are reducing the purchasing capacity of the poorest strata, and producing a negative impact on balances of payment and taxation stability in the developing countries. He even noted that "in mid-term perspective, growing food prices may be an incentive for investment in agriculture." Moreover, Kudrin believes that "price hikes on basic commodities and foods may be viewed as new opportunities."
Last year, the Russian authorities simply missed a hike in food prices. Much to their surprise, inflation in 2007 was 12 percent rather than the expected 8 percent. They did not come up with anything better than to conclude agreements with big food networks on freezing prices on certain foods. This measure is extremely ineffective in a market economy, not to mention that it violates domestic anti-monopoly legislation.
US stores forced to ration rice
Wal-Mart's warehouse chain Sam's Club became the second retailer in the US to limit bulk purchases of rice this week, citing "recent supply and demand trends". Earlier in the week, Seattle-based Costco Wholesale Corporation imposed limits in some stores on bulk rice purchases.
The extraordinary move constitutes the first time food rationing has been introduced in the US. While Americans suffered some rationing during World War II for items such as petrol, light bulbs and stockings, they have never had to limit consumption of a key food item.
World rice prices have more than doubled in the past year as demand has outstripped supply, with the drought-ravaged Australian crop blamed for contributing to the problem.
Australia's rice production has collapsed, with many farmers given a zero water allocation from the Murray River. This year's crop will be the smallest since 1960, with exports barely a 10th of recent years.
Until 2002-03, Australia exported on average 620,000 tonnes of rice a year - or 80 per cent of what it produced. But figures compiled by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics show the 2007-08 export crop will be 70,000 tonnes, with no improvement the following year.
Around the world, countries are restricting exports of rice and other grains as food prices rocket and nations move to ensure their own food security. The international price of rice has risen 118per cent in the past year despite world rice exports rising from 22.7 million tonnes in 2000 to a forecast 29.6 million tonnes this year.
Gary Helou, chief executive of Australian rice exporter Sunrice, said the accusation that the drought in Australia was causing food rationing in the US was "terribly ill-informed", saying Australia was a small player in the global rice market.
Ricegrowers' Association president Les Gordon agreed, saying prices were high due to "a straight-up case of supply and demand". "Supply has been slowly dwindling all around the world for the last 10 years, and it became apparent to our grain marketers 12 months, two years ago that it really was heading for a very low level," he said.
He is bemused by US supermarkets blaming Australia for shortages. "I can understand them having a run on rice in the supermarkets, but how they could tag that to drought in Australia is ... nonsense. None of our rice goes to America."
In Britain, rice is being rationed by shopkeepers in Asian districts to prevent hoarding.
Wal-Mart said Sam's Club, which sells food to restaurants and other retailers, had limited each customer to four 9kg bags of long-grain white rice per visit.
Sam's Club spokeswoman Kristy Reed would not comment on whether the problem was caused by short supplies or by customers stocking up in anticipation of higher prices.
"We are working with our suppliers to address this matter to ensure we are in stock, and we are asking for our members' co-operation and patience," Ms Reed said in a statement.
US Rice Federation spokesman David Coia denied there was a rice shortage in the US and suggested the panic run was due to small restaurants and retailers buying rice in larger quantities than usual to avoid higher prices.
Sam's Club has 593 stores, compared with 2523 Wal-Mart Supercentres that combine a full grocery section with general merchandise. Costco has 534 warehouses worldwide.
Costco Wholesale, the largest warehouse operator in the US, said this week that demand for rice and flour had risen, with customers panicking about shortages and hoarded produce.
Tim Johnson, of the California Rice Commission, said: "This is unprecedented. Americans, particularly in states such as California, have on occasion walked into a supermarket after a natural disaster and seen the shelves are less full than usual, but we have never experienced this."
In the past three months, wholesalers have experienced a sharp rise in demand for food items such as wheat, rice and milk as businesses have stocked up to protect themselves against rising prices.
Global rice prices have risen about 70 per cent this year, partly because countries such as China and India - whose economies are booming - are buying more food from abroad. Poor crop yields have contributed to the trend, raising concerns of severe shortages of the staple food consumed by almost half the world's population.
Food prices have also been driven up by increased demand for corn - the grain that is fermented to produce ethanol, the biofuel. Similar jumps in the price of wheat, corn and soybeans have led to riots in Haiti, Senegal and Pakistan.
Key rice producers have banned exports of rice to ensure their own people have access: India, China, Vietnam and Egypt have blocked exports and so demand for rice from countries such as the US has increased.
Rice Shortages Provoke Panic at Home and Riots Abroad
A sign informs customers of a purchase limit on rice at a Costco store in Mountain View, Calif., April 23, 2008.
BJ's Wholesale Club also said it reserves the right to limit rice purchases, and Costco said it's trying to deal with a spike in demand for both rice and flour.
"We don't want to create a panic where we don't think there is a panic, because if we weren't able to get any more rice or more flour, that would be a different story. But we are able to replenish our supplies," Costco president and CEO Jim Sinegal said.
He said he doesn't want to set off a panic, but some people worry that announcements like these will do just that.
"The danger is that when you do it, you cause the problem to get worse," professor and Brookings Institution economist Colin Bradford said. "This starts a panic ... as governments try to protect themselves on this front, the problem is that people get scared and they hoard — [a] vicious cycle."
"What we are looking at is one of the manifestations of tightening food supplies. Rice prices are skyrocketing," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."According to Brown, older people living on social security and single mothers are the ones in serious trouble. But the shortage will be annoying, not life-threatening, for most Americans because the United States, compared to other countries, is sheltered from commodity price increases.
"This [shortage] is not very common. I mean, I have to go back to my memories of World War II to remember rationing in any serious way," Brown said.
This rationing is the result of the worldwide food price crisis, caused by rising demand for food in places like India and China, the rising cost of fuel to get food to market, and by the fact that enormous amounts of corn in the United States are being diverted to produce ethanol as an alternative to gasoline.
In the United States, this food crisis is unlikely to create the sort of riots and political instability that have occurred in poorer countries around the world in recent weeks. Brown pointed out that in Pakistan, military escorts are already following all trucks carrying grain, and are guarding grain silos.
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23 April 2008
Alps largest glacier gone within 20 years
Tour boats now skim across a lake in front of the Tasman Glacier. In the 1980s there were only a few puddles. Photo / Glacier Explorers
"In the past 10 years the glacier has receded a hell of a lot," said glaciologist Dr Martin Brook.
"It's just too warm for a glacier to be sustained at such a low altitude - 730 metres above sea level - so it melts rapidly and it is going to disappear altogether".
The Tasman Glacier is the largest in the Southern Alps and at 29km was noted as one of the longest in the world's temperate zones.
In 1973 there was no lake in front of the Tasman Glacier, while new measurements taken last week indicate the lake at its foot is now 7km long, 2km wide and 245m deep.
The lake has attracted regular excursions by boatloads of tourists, but Dr Brook today warned they may be at risk from massive chunks of ice unexpectedly breaking loose underwater and surfacing as far as 60m from the glacier face.
"There's actually a sub-surface apron of ice that slopes away under the water for at least 50m or 60m from the front of the glacier," Dr Brook said. As this ice-apron melts, blocks of ice break off and float to the surface.
"This happens pretty quickly and is potentially a hazard for the tour boats that cruise up to the cliff: the blocks just pop out on the surface and some are between 5m and 10m in size."
The lake has been formed as the ice which makes up the glacier melts, and is a key factor in its destruction: the deeper the lake, the faster the retreat of the glacier.
According to another glaciologist, Trevor Chinn, the development of the lake was a "tipping point": no amount of snow at the head of the glacier, the neve, can compensate melting triggered by the lake.
Dr Brook, a lecturer in physical geography at Massey University, said the lake could only grow to a length of about 16km - allowing room for another 9km glacier retreat.
"We could expect further retreat of between 477m and 822m each year," he said. "At these rates it would take between 10 and 19 years for the lake to expand to its maximum."
His work has vindicated predictions made in 1990 by Dr Martin Kirkbride.
The last major survey of the glacier was in the 1990s and since then the glacier has retreated an average of 180m a year, exposing a basin carved out of rock more than 20,000 years ago when the glacier was a lot larger and more powerful.
Dr Brook and his research students are using a sonar and echo sounding equipment to measure the depth of the lake and analyse and analyse sediments under the lake.
Over the past couple of decades, a notch would develop at the waterline in the cliff of ice which is the face of the glacier, then melt back into the glacier to undercut the ice above, causing it to collapse into the lake.
At one time large blocks of blue ice, some about the size of the Dunedin Railway Station, were deposited in the lake.
But because a much larger part of the glacier is submerged, the 2degC water is causing a faster retreat of the ice face, leaving a "foot" of ice extending out into the lake.
"The result is large pieces of ice fracturing off the ice foot and floating on the surface," Dr Brook said.
Dr Brook said the team was also investigating a the way the glacier's melt differs to the "clean-ice" glaciers on the West Coast. These smaller, steeper glaciers, such as the Fox and Franz Josef, retreat and advance more erratically.
Tasman is covered in rock and debris, and has a different relationship with the climate, and different patterns of retreat.
Bay Area left vulnerable to tuberculosis epidemic
(top left) A photograph an X- Ray of a patient who developed active tuberculosi
Regions with global connections seeing increase in disease
In a beautiful home filled with mementos of world travel, a 44-year-old Silicon Valley executive reluctantly picks up the telephone to tell several business contacts that he might have infected them with tuberculosis. Regions with global connections seeing increase in disease
In a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, a new mother feels her life slipping away. She is losing her hearing, her feet are going numb and her face carries a rash from the toxic drugs being used to fight the drug-resistant bacteria in her lungs. Her body has dwindled to 87 pounds and she wonders: Would my husband and infant son be better off if I was dead?
In Helena, Mont., the state's tuberculosis official takes an urgent call from the laboratory and feels her stomach knot. She has a patient with a potentially infectious, dangerous TB strain — a case her state lacks the money and the medical resources to treat.
Those three small snapshots are all part of a global tuberculosis epidemic that threatens the Bay Area — with its web of international connections — like few places in the nation.
Call it one price of globalism.
Last year, tuberculosis increased in four of the Bay Area's five largest counties, and the San Jose area in 2006 had the highest TB rate of any large American metro area, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health. San Francisco, after an outbreak of TB among Latino dayworkers in the Mission district, has the highest TB rate of any in California, quadruple the US rate.
Vanishing butterflies
How numbers have plunged after a soggy summer
The fluttering of butterflies could be a rare sight in our gardens this spring and summer, conservationists warned yesterday. 
The fluttering of butterflies could be a rare sight in our gardens this spring and summer, conservationists warned yesterday.
Last year's unusually wet weather devastated their breeding season and left many vulnerable species struggling, according to a report from the charity Butterfly Conservation.
By the end of last summer, numbers were at their lowest for 25 years while eight species were at an all-time low.
UK butterflies desperately need good weather in the coming months to recover, the charity says.
Butterflies are unable to fly in heavy rain. Last summer's torrential downpours came during the crucial breeding, feeding and laying season.
Dr Tom Brereton, the charity's head of monitoring, said: "Last summer was the worst for a quarter of a century.
"We are not that optimistic for this year because it was such a bad breeding season.
"The only positive thing is that we didn't have a drought so there was plenty of food for the caterpillars in the autumn.
"We need some nice warm weather, calm sunny days and a little rain if they are to recover. They could bounce back."
The statistics come from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, operated by Butterfly Conservation and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
Each year it collects data from thousands of volunteers. The eight butterflies found to be at an all-time low were the common blue, the grayling, the Lulworth skipper, the small skipper, the small tortoiseshell, the speckled wood, the chalkhill blue and the wall.
The decline has been speedy. Common blues are down 78 per cent compared with 2003 while numbers of small tortoiseshells fell by 81 per cent in the same period.
Other species that have suffered badly include the high brown fritillary and the duke of burgundy.
Sir David Attenborough, president of Butterfly Conservation, is promoting an appeal to raise funds to help avoid a crisis.
"Butterflies face mounting threats," he said. "Some face possible extinction.
"Money from our Stop Extinction Appeal will restore countryside for butterflies and other wildlife."
Red back spider plague forces hospital closure
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The hospital in Baralaba, a tiny town in Queensland, 200 miles northwest of Brisbane, has been plagued by red back spiders for months.
Unseasonably humid conditions have created perfect breeding conditions for the arachnids, which are jet black with a splash of red on their backs and deadly, despite being barely the size of a pea.
A bite by the spider, which is a relative of the black widow, can cause severe pain, muscle spasms and ultimately death, although no fatalities have been recorded since an anti-venom was developed in the 1950s.
"We've been inundated," said Bruce Dekker, a local pest controller. "We've had them in toys and Tonka Trucks, under kids' bike seats and even in sand pits where kids are playing."
Attempts to oust the spiders by spraying with pesticides have failed, so patients and staff will today be moved to a nearby medical centre to allow a thorough fumigation of the tiny, 10-bed hospital.
"We believe the best way to deal with them, and the safest option for staff and patients, is to have the whole building fumigated so both the spiders and their eggs are killed," said Ellen Palmer, Queensland's rural director of nursing.
"The spiders are mostly in the ceiling but we are also finding them in the main part of the hospital."
Arctic ice melting is approaching a point of no return
The inland ice of Greenland can be seen from a helicopter, in August 2007.
MONTREAL (AFP) - Arctic sea ice is melting "significantly faster" than predicted and is approaching a point of no return, conservation group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned in a new study released Wednesday.
The volumes of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice in the Arctic Ocean were estimated at 2.9 million and 4.4 million cubic metres respectively in September 2007 -- the lowest ever levels recorded, the organization said.
The sea ice shrank to 39 percent below its 1979-2000 mean volume, it said.
"Recently observed changes are happening at rates significantly faster than predicted" by the 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) and last year's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), WWF said.
The melting of arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet was happening so fast that experts were now questioning whether the situation is close to "tipping point," where sudden and possibly irreversible change takes place.
"When you look in detail at the science behind the recent Arctic changes it becomes painfully clear how our understanding of climate impacts lags behind the changes that we are already seeing in the Arctic," said Martin Sommerkorn, one of the authors of the report.
The WWF will present its report, comprised of the latest research in the region, to the meeting Thursday of the Arctic Council, which groups Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.
The conservation group's researchers also warned of the devastating effect the rapid melting of the arctic ice could have on polar bears in Canada, where two thirds of the world's population of the animals live.
"Previous models had predicted that melting sea ice would mean some polar bear populations could become extinct by 2050. The new evidence points to even earlier regional extinctions," said Peter Ewins, director of species conservation at WWF-Canada.
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada will present the government with its estimates of the status of polar bears there on Friday.
India's Rice, Wheat Crops Reduced by Rats, Wastage
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- India's record rice and wheat harvests may not be enough to ensure food security in the world's second-most populous nation because about 10 percent of the crop is lost to pests or rots in inadequate warehouses.
Agriculture Secretary P.K. Mishra yesterday said production of food grains may rise 4.6 percent to an estimated 227.3 million metric tons in the year ending June 30. About 20 million tons of wheat, rice and lentils, the equivalent of Canada's annual wheat crop, is eaten by rats and birds or spoils.
Governments across Asia are clamping down on exports and encouraging imports of staple foods to secure domestic supplies, prevent social tension and ease inflation which is near a three- year high in India. Rice, wheat, corn and soybeans reached records this year.
``I agree that post-harvest capacity needs to be given more focus,'' Mishra said in New Delhi after announcing crop forecasts. ``Some areas have good facilities and some areas don't.''
The lack of silos and secure warehouses in India, the world's second-biggest producer of wheat and rice, is hindering government efforts to curb inflation, which has doubled in the last four months to 7.14 percent in the week ended April 5, fueled by a global spurt in food and commodity prices.
``It's a problem of plenty and the government should modernize its warehouses and transportation system,'' said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the New Delhi-based farm lobby group Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. ``There is a huge pressure because of international prices and now is the time to address this issue.''
Private Investments
Companies such as Adani Enterprises Ltd., the country's biggest private farm goods exporter, may seek opportunities to expand storage capacities. Adani has silos that store about 650,000 tons of wheat for state-run Food Corp. of India, the nation's biggest buyer of food grains.
``The government should encourage private investments in creating infrastructure for handling of agricultural commodities,'' Atul Chaturvedi, president of Adani Enterprises, said yesterday by phone from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. ``In this scenario India can't afford to lose crops.''
Rice, the staple food for half the world, has more than doubled to a record in the past year after countries including Vietnam, China, Egypt and India reduced exports to ensure local supplies and to control rising food costs.
Rice Prices
Rough rice for July delivery rose as much as 2.3 percent to $24.745 per 100 pounds in after-hours electronic trading on the Chicago Board of Trade and traded at $24.48 at 12:02 p.m. Singapore time. The contract has gained 77 percent this year.
India's wheat output may climb to 76.8 million tons this year, Mishra said. That's more than the 74.8 million tons estimated in February and up from 75.8 million tons last year.
Rice output may rise to a record 95.7 million tons, from 94.1 million tons estimated on Feb. 7, he said. That's 2.5 percent more than the 93.6 million tons produced a year earlier.
State-run companies and cooperatives have a capacity to hold about 109.2 million tons and need an additional 35 million tons of space to fill the gap, according to a report prepared for India's Planning Commission.
Of India's total production, about 60 percent is retained and stored by farmers for consumption, use as seed and payment of wages to laborers, the report by the working group on agricultural marketing infrastructure and policy said.
About 30 percent of total farm produce in India is stored in the open, resulting in wastage and distress sales. The group has recommended spending 76.9 billion rupees ($1.9 billion) on creating storage capacity of 35 million tons and another 157.1 billion rupees to build a network of refrigerated stores to hold 4.5 million tons.
Grains kept by farmers are typically stored in rooms, bamboo structures, wooden or mud bins and underground structures and are prone to damage by rats and insects, the group said.
22 April 2008
'Silent tsunami' of hunger threatens world:
The head of the agency's World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, said spiralling food prices could push more than 100 million people worldwide into a level of poverty where they cannot afford to feed themselves.
"This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," said Sheeran.
The summit, hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is aimed at figuring out a plan to address the food crisis to present to the European Union, the G8 and a special UN meeting over the next few months.
Among those attending the meeting are UN officials, policymakers and experts.
Protests and riots have broken out in several developing countries in response to the rising costs of staples such as corn, wheat and rice. The rising prices are due to a combination of poor harvests, rising energy prices, growing demand in India and China, and the increasing use of fields to produce corn for ethanol.
Sheeran said the crisis is "a silent tsunami that respects no borders."
"The world's misery index is rising … as soaring food and fuel prices roll through the lives of the most vulnerable," she said Friday.
$755 million needed
The WFP says the food crisis is the biggest challenge it has faced in its 45-year history and it is forcing the agency to look at cutting aid to some recipients.
A program to feed 450,000 children in Cambodian schools may have to be cut beginning in May unless new funding can be found, the WFP says.
Sheeran said that $12 billion in donations poured in following the devastating tsunami in 2004 that left nearly a quarter of a million people dead in Southeast Asia. "We need that same kind of action and generosity [again]," she said.
On the weekend, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the WFP needs an extra $755 million to cover the rising costs of existing emergency operations.
"Tackling hunger is a moral challenge to each of us and it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of nations," Brown said in an article on the government website.
"So I believe we need to see a fully co-ordinated response by the international community."
He signalled that Britain may be willing to rethink its stance on biofuel targets if it might reduce the impact on food prices.
"If our U.K. review shows that we need to change our approach, we will also push for change in EU [European Union] biofuels targets," he wrote.
Unrest over the food crisis has led to deaths in Cameroon and Haiti, cost Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis his job, and caused hungry textile workers to clash with police in Bangladesh.
Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said more protests in other developing nations appear likely. "We are going through a very serious crisis and we are going to see lots of food strikes and demonstrations," Annan told reporters in Geneva.
Climate Change May Put The World at War
Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned.
The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in energy research spending to around £10 billion a year would be needed if the world were to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.
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However the group said that the response to threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate," because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
"We're preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11," said Nick Mabey, the author of the report who was a former senior member of the Prime Minister's strategy unit.
Last week Lord Stern, who compiled an economic assessment of climate change for the Government, said that he had underestimated the possible economic consequences.
Mr Mabey said leading economies should be preparing for what would happen if climate change turned out to be at the top of the predicted temperature range.
His report said: "If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states."
It added: "Our energy and climate security will increasingly depend on stronger alliances with other large energy consumers, such as China, to develop and deploy new energy technologies, and less on relations with oil producing states."
Rice Climbs to Record as World Bank Warns of Thai Export Risk
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Rice jumped to a record as World Bank officials said they are concerned pressure is growing in Thailand, the world's largest exporter, to restrict shipments, worsening a global food crisis.
``If a key exporter like this limits foreign sales, it would be very much like Saudi Arabia reducing oil exports,'' said James Adams, vice president of the bank's East Asia and Pacific department. China, Vietnam, India and Egypt have curbed overseas sales to safeguard domestic supplies and cool inflation.
Rice, the staple for half the world, gained as much as 2.3 percent in Chicago today, more than doubling in the past year. Wheat, corn and soybeans advanced to records this year, spurring social unrest in countries including Haiti and Egypt.
``Any move by Thailand to limit exports would create panic in the global market,'' Kenji Kobayashi, a grain analyst at Kanetsu Asset Management Co., said by phone from Tokyo today. The Southeast Asian country ships one-third of the world's exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Soaring prices may put basic foods beyond the reach of the poorest people, raising the risk of a ``silent famine'' in Asia, a World Food Program official said April 21. The poor will struggle to afford higher costs even as supplies stay available in shops, according to Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations agency that feeds 28 million Asians.
Thai Pressure
Thailand may follow its Asian neighbors in limiting sales, the World Bank's Adams said in an interview. The more countries impose export constraints, the ``stronger the pressures become for Thailand to do the same,'' he said April 21.
The nation won't impose curbs on overseas sales amid record prices, Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej said at a press conference yesterday, adding there would be no measures by the government that may distort prices.
``Thailand will lose the name of kitchen of the world'' should it reduce shipments, he said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said April 20 rising food costs may hurt economic growth and threaten political security. The World Bank has forecast that 33 nations from Mexico to Yemen may face social unrest because of higher food and energy costs.
The price of grade-B white rice, the benchmark export variety, reached a record $854 a ton on April 9, the most recent date for which prices are available. This compares with $327.25 a ton this time last year. Thailand exports almost twice the amount of rice as India, its nearest rival.
Prices Curb Sales
Thai exporters said foreign sales are already hurt by high prices. According to Chookiat Ophaswongse, president of the Thai Rice Exporters Association, the country's rice exports may fall by one-third by the end of the year as high prices erode demand.
Rice futures in Chicago climbed to $24.745 per 100 pounds today and traded at $24.510 at 11:30 a.m. Singapore time. Corn traded at $6.0525 a bushel, near its $6.23 record on April 17.
World Vision International, which provides food relief in 35 countries, said it can no longer provide rations to 1.5 million of the poor people it fed last year because of soaring costs and unmet donor aid commitments.
``Despite our best efforts, more than a million of our beneficiaries are no longer receiving food aid,'' World Vision President Dean Hirsch said in a statement yesterday. ``Around 572,000 of these are children who urgently need enough healthy food to thrive.''
India's record rice and wheat harvests may not be enough to ensure food security in the world's second-most populous nation because about 10 percent of the crop is lost to pests or rots in inadequate warehouses.
Pests Spoil Crops
Agriculture Secretary P.K. Mishra yesterday said production of food grains will rise 4.6 percent to an estimated 227.3 million metric tons in the year ending June 30. About 20 million tons of wheat, rice and lentils, the equivalent of Canada's annual wheat crop, is eaten by rats and birds or spoils.
``I agree that post-harvest capacity needs to be given more focus,'' Mishra said in New Delhi after announcing the forecasts. ``Some areas have good facilities and some areas don't.''
In Cambodia, 13-year-old Pin Oudam gets a free breakfast of rice, fish and yellow split peas every morning at his school in Kampong Speu, the poorest province. Next week he won't.
The World Food Program cut off rice deliveries to 1,344 Cambodian schools last month after prices doubled and suppliers defaulted on contracts. Schools will run out of food by May 1, depriving about 450,000 children of meals, the WFP estimates.
Global warming threat to native dragonfly species
The small red-eyed damselfly had not been seen in the UK until a decade ago, but is now found from Devon to Norfolk
The five-year project, to be launched on Thursday, will result in a new atlas of the 39 species of dragonfly and damselfly that breed in Britain – which are soon likely to be joined by several others.
As it warms up, the climate is bringing new species into the UK from continental Europe, and allowing species already here to move further north. Already, one new European species has established itself here since the publication of the last British dragonfly atlas in 1996 – the small red-eyed damselfly. A decade ago it had never been seen in the UK; now it has breeding colonies from Devon to Norfolk, and continues to spread.
Other new continental species likely to start breeding here soon include the red-veined darter, the yellow-winged darter and the lesser emperor. However, the changing climate may also be a threat to native species, and the British Dragonfly Society (BDS) calculates that 14 of the current 39 may be at risk, including specialists such as the northern damselfly of the Scottish Highlands, and the Norfolk hawker of the Norfolk Broads.
Its survey project, entitled Dragonflies In Focus, will seek to recruit more people to monitor dragonflies in their wetland habitats, and will offer training to anyone interested.
The new atlas, due for publication in 2013, will act as a baseline against which future changes can be mapped, and be used to monitor endangered species and make conservation decisions. "They have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and several ice ages, but can dragonflies survive the increasing pressures imposed by mankind?" said Katharine Parkes, a BDS conservation officer. "Understanding where and how quickly our dragonflies are moving will help us plan for the future. They are temperature-sensitive, making them useful for climate change impact studies."
Dragonflies are useful indicators of both aquatic and terrestrial habitats owing to their life cycle, which involves at least a year as a larva under water, then feeding, roosting and mating above ground as adults for up to two months.
Water - the under-reported resource crisis
Food riots in Haiti, strikes over rice shortages in Bangladesh, tortilla trouble in Mexico and bread wars in Egypt.
Soaring food prices are causing more misery round the world than the credit crunch. But what is the cause?
Biofuels are part of it, clearly. A quarter of US corn is now put into tanks rather than stomachs. And oil price rises are feeding in, via the cost of fertiliser and transport. We are using them to death. And with two-thirds of the water abstracted from nature round the world going to irrigate crops, water shortages equal food shortages. Consider. The two underlying causes of the world food crisis are falling supplies and rising demand on the international market. Add in speculation, panic and hoarding and you have a perfect food storm. Why falling supplies? Because of major droughts in Australia, one of the world's big three suppliers, and Ukraine, another major exporter. Those droughts bite hard because both countries are already using their water reserves to the limit. Australia's wheat exports are 60 per cent down; rice exports are 90 per cent down. Why rising demand? Mainly because of booming China, where demand for grain is rising sharply at a time when every last drop of water in the north of the country, its major breadbasket, is already taken. The Yellow River rarely reaches the sea now. China can't feed itself any more, for want of water. Ditto India, where underground water reserves are being over pumped by 100 cubic kilometres a year. Most of the Middle East is in the same boat. Hence the bread riots in Egypt, where the River Nile no longer reaches the sea because all its water is taken for irrigation. In recent years, much of the global food trade has become a proxy trade in water. Or rather, the water needed to grow the food. "Virtual water," some economists call it. The virtual water trade has kept the hungry in dry lands fed. But now that system is breaking down, because there are too many buyers and not enough sellers. Till two years ago, the world's biggest supplier of virtual water was Australia. It exported a staggering 70 cubic kilometres of water a year in the form of crops, mainly food. Drought has more than halved that figure. It may never recover. Right now, we in Europe can get the food we need - at a price. But we are not immune. Britain imports large amounts of food. It works out at 40 cubic kilometres of virtual water a year, or more than twice the water we use annually within our own borders. In Britain, we don't often think about water shortages, except when there is a hosepipe ban. We should. Because even as it rains at home, the world water crisis is encroaching. |
20 April 2008
The sound of silence: Britain's lost birds
Sue Tranter/RSPB-images.com
The woodlands of Britain are becoming quieter every year, as native birds fail to reproduce and migrants don’t return. What exactly is going on? Michael McCarthy investigatesListen: on this chilly afternoon at the end of March, Blean Woods are reverberating with birdsong. Several robins are uttering the twittering warbles that proclaim their territory, a chiffchaff is slipping out its metronomic, two-note call, and every couple of minutes a green woodpecker fires off its yaffle – its staccato burst of notes carries through the trees. Over it all a song thrush is singing from the top of a still-leafless chestnut, silhouetted against the sky; it is enormously loud for such a squib of a thing, each phrase repeated with such cold sweet clarity that it triggers in the mind Philip Larkin's memorable catching of just such a bird, singing in a garden at just this time of year: "its fresh-peeled voice/ astonishing the brickwork".
Continue
19 April 2008
German island's 'white cliffs' collapsing into the sea
ANDREAS KUESTERMANN/ EPA
The towering chalk cliffs that form the spectacular coastline of the Baltic holiday island of Rügen have been immortalised by 19th- century Romantic painters and are Germany's equivalent of the white cliffs of Dover – but now they are collapsing into the sea.
Officials on Germany's largest island were yesterday forced to shut down a harbour on Rügen's north east coast and close kilometre-long stretches of beach because of fears that large swathes of its legendary cliffs would disintegrate and tumble into the Baltic Sea.
The emergency measures were announced after a 100-metre long section of cliff near the island port of Sassnitz fell into the sea on Wednesday, sending 20,000 cubic metres of chalk crashing several hundred feet on to the beach below. The landslide posed a serious threat to tourists, who visit Rügen in large numbers.
Island officials and conservation experts said yesterday that unusually high rainfall and record water table levels had caused the cliffs to become completely waterlogged, which made them particularly susceptible to disintegration and collapse. Tourists were warned to stay off all beaches beneath the cliffs.
Jörg Gothow, the spokesman for civil engineers monitoring the state of the cliffs, said that every second measuring device installed along one section showed that water content levels had topped last year's all-time high. "The water levels are extreme," he said.
Rügen's chalk cliffs feature in numerous works by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who visited the island frequently at the beginning of the 19th century. The cliffs, which offer panoramic views of the Baltic Sea and Germany's mainland coast, are the highlight of the island's national park and are visited by millions each year.
Aerial photographs of the island's north-east normally display a pristine coastline of shining white cliffs crowned by a large forest of beech trees. But pictures taken this week showed that huge swathes of cliff face had been stained brown by the flow of rainwater or had simply collapsed, crushing carefully-built wooden cliff stairways under heaps of sodden chalk. The latest casualty to suffer from the imminent threat of a cliff landslide is the small yacht and fishing harbour at the village of Lohme on Rügen's north coast. The harbour was allowed to disintegrate while Rügen was under Communist rule, but it was painstakingly restored after German reunification in 1990 and offered hotels, a pub-restaurant and facilities for yachts.
The harbour and the surrounding village are facing an uncertain future. "Because of the current situation we have been forced to shut down the entire harbour and the pub," Karl-Heinz Walter, a district official, said yesterday. He said a ban had been imposed on entering a number of other properties in the village because the cliff face above was unstable. "There is an extreme danger of further landslides ," he said.
A landslide first hit the village in March 2005, when a 100-metre section of cliff toppled into the harbour – nearly taking a retirement home with it. In recent years many sections of cliff face have collapsed on to Rügen's beaches or into the sea below.
A vista called Wissower Klinken, which forms a ravine in the cliffs, was captured by Friedrich in one of his paintings. The artist's view was permanently altered in early 2005 when a section of cliff depicted in the painting collapsed on to the beach below after heavy rain.
Geologists say the cliffs have always suffered from erosion resulting from hard frosts followed by a sudden thaw and the effects of wind and waves. However, the heavy rainfall experienced during recent winters, which coincides with scientific data about the warming of the Baltic Sea, appears to have dramatically worsened the problem.
18 April 2008
World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May
To many people, this means nothing. But of course 666 refers to the Beast in the Bible. Heaven knows what ten sixes means.
I don’t know who first noticed this looming numerical curiosity, but it was mentioned today on the Drudge report. To see the projection, go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection page. There you’ll find these projections among others:
05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141
So sometime in between May 1 and June 1, the gaggle-of-sixes milestone will be passed. (I say gaggle rather than googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I could also have used a gazillion or a jillion or a bazillion, all of which are just figures of speech meaning “a lot.” Clearly, the number of people on Earth is a lot more than umpteen.)
The Census Bureau of course never knows exactly how many people are on the planet, or even in the United States for that matter. It’s all estimates. Just fun.
The last big “six scare” was 06/06/06 (June 6, 2006). We survived that, so I imagine we’ll get through this one.
(For the record, 07/07/07 came and went last year without any documented cases of extreme luck directly attributed to the date, and coming up later this year: 08/08/08.
I don’t know who first noticed this looming numerical curiosity, but it was mentioned today on the Drudge report. To see the projection, go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection page. There you’ll find these projections among others:
05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141
So sometime in between May 1 and June 1, the gaggle-of-sixes milestone will be passed. (I say gaggle rather than googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I could also have used a gazillion or a jillion or a bazillion, all of which are just figures of speech meaning “a lot.” Clearly, the number of people on Earth is a lot more than umpteen.)
The Census Bureau of course never knows exactly how many people are on the planet, or even in the United States for that matter. It’s all estimates. Just fun.
The last big “six scare” was 06/06/06 (June 6, 2006). We survived that, so I imagine we’ll get through this one.
(For the record, 07/07/07 came and went last year without any documented cases of extreme luck directly attributed to the date, and coming up later this year: 08/08/08.
Wild fires likely to spread due to global warming
VIENNA (Reuters) - Wild fires are likely to be bigger, more frequent and burn for longer as the world gets hotter, in turn speeding up global warming to create a dangerous vicious circle, scientists say.
The process is being studied as part of work to develop a detailed map of global fire patterns which will be used with climate models to predict future fire trends.
The scientists told a geoscience conference in Vienna they already predict fires will increase and could spread to previously fire-free parts of the world as the climate changes.
"An increase in fire may be the greatest early impact of climate change on forests," Brian Amiro from the University of Manitoba said late on Wednesday.
"Our forests are more likely to become a victim of climate change than a savior," he added.
Last year more than 200 wild fires swept across parts of southeastern Europe, destroying homes and devouring woodland. In Greece 65 people died.
Amiro said global warming will cause more fires which as they burn contribute to global warming by producing greenhouse gases.
"Fire avoids environmental extremes, like the deserts, tundra and rainforests," said Max Moritz from the University of California, Berkley. Continued...
Hijackings force UN to halve food aid to 3m people in war-hit Darfur
· At least 60 agency lorries attacked in four months
· Lack of army escorts and peace force delays blamed
· Lack of army escorts and peace force delays blamed
Women carry water at Abushouk camp near El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters
The World Food Programme is to halve food rations for up to 3 million people in Darfur from next month because of insecurity along the main supply routes. At least 60 WFP lorries have been hijacked since December in Sudan's western province, where government forces and rebels have been at war for five years. The hijacks have drastically curtailed the delivery of food to warehouses ahead of the rainy season that lasts from May to September, when there is limited market access and crop stocks are depleted.
Instead of the normal ration of 500 grams of cereal a day, people in displaced persons' camps and conflict-affected villages will only get 225 grams from next month, the UN agency said yesterday. Rations of pulses and sugar will also be halved, giving people barely 60% of their recommended minimum daily calorie intake.
The WFP said that while Sudan's government provided security for convoys on the main supply routes, the escorts were too infrequent, given the huge demand for food at this time of year. "Attacks on the food pipeline are an attack on the most vulnerable people in Darfur," said Josette Sheeran, the agency's executive director. "With up to 3 million people depending on us for their survival in the rainy season, keeping WFP's supply line open is a matter of life and death. We call on all parties to protect the access to food."
Thirty nine hijacked lorries and 26 drivers are still missing. More than 90 vehicles belonging to other aid agencies have also been hijacked this year, with some drivers forced to work for the combatants.
Humanitarian compounds are also increasingly at risk. On a single night this month robberies were reported at nine UN and aid agency compounds in El Fasher, the main town in north Darfur.
Oxfam said yesterday that the attacks and banditry were "critically affecting the entire humanitarian response" at a time when people were still being displaced from their homes by the fighting. "The insecurity means some areas of Darfur are effectively out of bounds to aid agencies, and rural areas where the needs are often greatest of all are inaccessible for months at a time," said Alun McDonald, a spokesman for Oxfam in Sudan.
It had been hoped that the hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, which took over from the purely African force on January 1, would help to improve the security situation. But only 9,600 of the 26,000 peacekeepers are in place, due to disagreements with the Khartoum government over the make-up and duties of the operation, coupled with UN bureaucratic delays. Meanwhile, government forces continue to mount air and ground offensives in areas controlled by the Justice and Equality Movement and a Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction headed by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, while the rebels have stepped up ambushes of army convoys.
Pro-government Arab "Janjaweed" militias, who at the start of the conflict in 2003 were enlisted to lead attacks on villages deemed sympathetic to the rebels, have added to the instability. Angry at not being paid by the government, the militias went on looting and killing sprees in main market towns such as El Fasher, Kebkabiya and Tawila in recent weeks. The attacks reportedly prompted elements within an SLA branch led by Minni Minnawi, which signed a peace agreement with President Omar al-Bashir in 2006, to distance themselves from the government by deploying fighters to defend traders from their Zaghawa tribe against the Arab raiders.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said on Wednesday he was "extremely disappointed at the lack of progress on all fronts" in Darfur. "The parties appear determined to pursue a military solution; the political process [has] stalled, the deployment of Unamid is progressing very slowly ... and the humanitarian situation is not improving. The primary obstacle is the lack of political will among all the parties to pursue a peaceful solution to the crisis."
16 April 2008
Food riots 'an apocalyptic warning'
Basic food is become a rare commodity for many (File photo) (AFP: Mustafa Ozer)
Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries.
The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time.
The desperation in dozens of countries has turned deadly of late. In the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon.
World Vision Australia head Tim Costello says the situation is desperate and chronic.
"It is an apocalyptic warning," he said. "Until recently we had plenty of food. The question was distribution.
"The truth is because of rising oil prices, global warming and the loss of arable land, all countries that can produce food now desperately need to produce more."
Help from developed countries is the best remedy that The Group of Seven industrialised countries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can think of.
They have been meeting in Washington over the past week hoping to forge a new deal for global food policy.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick says part of that new deal is meeting the immediate crisis and the needs of those who are now facing hunger, malnutrition, and starvation across the world.
"Throughout the weekend, we've heard again and again from ministers in developing countries and emerging economies that this is a priority issue," he said.
IMF managing director Dominic Strauss-Kahn says if food prices continue to rise there will be dire consequences, particularly in Africa.
"Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving," he said.
"Disruption may occur in the economic environment so that at the end of the day most governments, having done well for the last five or 10 years, will see what they have done totally destroyed and their legitimacy facing the population destroyed also."
Mr Zoellick says the food price surge could push 100 million people in developing countries further into poverty and governments must step in.
"Hunger, malnutrition and food policy have formed a recurrent theme at this weekend's meetings," he said.
"I believe we've made some progress, but it'll be important to continue to retain this focus as we leave Washington."
Aid and charity groups says Australia can do more.
Mr Costello says there is a great responsibility being a major food producer.
"So our both growing more food and contributing that to the world's poor is now urgent and is a morally serious claim on us," he said.
The Federal Government says it takes the warning about food prices seriously.
Parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, Bob McMullan, says Australia is one of the world's largest donors of World Food Program assistance.
"We all look sympathetically at this most recent approach from the World Food Program and I'll have a look at whether there's something extra that arises from what the chairman of the World Bank has had to say," he said.
"But in the main, we are very well aware that this is a big issue and some of the underlying factors are long-term.
"Some of them are short-term, including the Australian drought, but there are some long-term factors that are impacting on the price of food."
Global warming rage lets global hunger grow
We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.
"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.
The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.
Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.
Argentina, Canada, and Eastern Europe are joining the race.
Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.
Argentina, Canada, and Eastern Europe are joining the race.
What about the California state retirement fund (Calpers), the Norwegian Petroleum fund, the Dutch pension giants, et al, pushing a wall of money into the $200bn commodity index funds?
They have undoubtedly bid up the futures contracts, but the FAO says this has no durable effect on food prices. These index funds never take delivery of grains. All they do is distort the shape of the maturities curve years ahead, allowing farmers to lock in eye-watering prices. That should cause more planting.
Is there any more land? Yes, in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, where acreage planted has fallen 12pc since Soviet days. Existing grain yields are 2.4 tonnes per hectare in Ukraine, 1.8 in Russia, and 1.11 in Kazakhstan, com-pared with 6.39 in the US. Investment would do wonders here. But the structure is chaotic.
Brazil has the world's biggest reserves of "potential arable land" with 483m hectares (it currently cultivates 67m), and Colombia has 62m - both offering biannual harvests.
The catch is obvious. "The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid," said Professor John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser.
Goldman Sachs says the cost of ethanol from corn is $81 a barrel (oil equivalent), with wheat at $145 and soybeans $232. It is built on subsidy.
New technology may open the way for the use of non-edible grain stalks to make ethanol, but for now the only biofuel crop that genuinely pays its way is sugar cane ($35). Sugar is carbohydrate: ideal for fuel. Grains contain proteins made of nitrogen: useless for fuel, but vital for people.
Whatever the arguments, politics is intruding. Food export controls have been imposed by Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Argentina, and Serbia. We are disturbingly close to a chain reaction that could shatter our assumptions about food security.
The Philippines - a country with ample foreign reserves of $36bn (Britain has $27bn) - last week had to enlist its embassies to hunt for grain supplies after China withheld shipments. Washington stepped in, pledging "absolutely" to cover Philippine grain needs. A new Cold War is taking shape, around energy and food.
The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.
Space shots show cluttered earth skies
Space shots show cluttered earth skiesComputer generated images released by the European Space Agency overnight show a crowded atmosphere and skies above the earth.
The ESA released images showing trackable objects including satellites and space junk moving across the earth.
The image appears more similar to that of a swarm of birds, however the ESA says the generated images illustrate the huge congestion of objects swarming above us.
It is estimated that nearly 12,000 space objects make their way around the earth each day in orbit, with the majority of them at an altitude of about 1000 kilometres above the surface.
In comparison, a commercial aircraft in-flight will travel at about 10 kilometres above the surface, or 35,000 feet.
The ESA also says the low-orbits mean much of the space junk, excluding satellites, will continue orbit for at least ten years.
SKorea upgrades bird flu alert, troops on standby
South Korean quarantine officials prepare to enter a poultry farm
SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea on Wednesday issued a nationwide bird flu alert, deployed troops and put firefighters on standby to try to contain the spread of the disease, officials said.
The agriculture ministry said in a statement the "orange" vigilance level was extended to the whole country after previously covering only the badly hit southwest.
The ministry said it had confirmed 20 outbreaks involving the H5 virus, of which at least six were the deadly H5N1 subtype, since the first case was reported in Gimje, 260 kilometres (162 miles) south of Seoul, in early April.
It is investigating 14 more suspected cases, including one on a farm in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometres south of Seoul.
Officials have slaughtered 2.2 million chickens and ducks in and around infected farms. These are mainly in the South and North Jeolla provinces, a hub of the poultry industry.
"As avian influenza is spreading, the military has decided to help slaughter and bury poultry in the infected areas," a defence ministry spokesman said.
The spokesman said an initial contingent of about 200 troops was deployed in and around the Gimje area Wednesday to help cull chickens and ducks.
A separate group of about 180 soldiers had already been manning checkpoints to help control movements in infected areas.
The National Emergency Management Agency ordered local firefighters to be ready to help with disinfecting vehicles and farms or other tasks, although it said they would not take part in culls.
"We'll do whatever we can do to prevent the bird flu outbreaks from spreading nationwide, which is now a national concern," Kim Kook-Rae, a senior agency official, told AFP.
Authorities have yet to fully explain why the outbreaks are not abating, but said Tuesday that a poultry dealer was under investigation for breaching quarantine restrictions.
The dealer was found to have taken hundreds of ducks from an infected Gimje farm and supplied them to retailers and restaurants in other regions.
The agriculture ministry said it had located 141 restaurants or farms which had recently been visited by the dealer, and had so far slaughtered poultry at 34 of the total.
South Korea reported seven cases of H5N1 infection between November 2006 and March last year, resulting in the temporary suspension of poultry exports to Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere.
But last June the World Organisation for Animal Health classified the country as free from the disease.
The H5N1 strain has killed more than 230 people worldwide since late 2003. No South Koreans have contracted the disease.
Drought refuge sought for endangered fish
A native fish feared to be near extinction will be put into temporary refuges in South Australia to help ensure its survival.
The southern purple-spotted gudgeon has lost its natural habitat because of ongoing drought.
Suzanne Keith from Waterfind Environment Fund hopes the fish will be able to breed in the refuges for release into the wild when the usual water flows return.
She says sites in the Adelaide Hills are under consideration.
"They're mostly related to the River Murray watershed where they naturally came from," she said.
"We're looking at things like the water quality, the vegetation around the particular dam, absence of predators and competitors that could damage the fish.
"Also the absence of stock - we don't really want dams where stock are going to be going in and wading and drinking."
US rice and corn prices hit record on supply worries
U.S. rice and corn futures rose to all-time highs on Wednesday, buoyed by concerns of tight supply. The world's largest importer of rice, Philippines, sought to buy 1 million metric tons and delayed planting in the U.S., raising concerns of global shortage.
U.S. export business as Argentina
On the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), rough rice futures posted the biggest advances on Tuesday. Rice in
CBOT rice prices have doubled since last September while Asian prices have soared even more sharply since January, as big importers have rushed to build stocks on fears that supplies will become scarce as exporters clamp down on shipments.
"We've seen an unprecedented bull run in rice prices," Luke Chandler, senior commodities analyst at Rabobank Group, said in an interview today with Bloomberg Television. "It's almost becoming like a supply shock because the countries that rely on the imports aren't able to access the available sources."
Farmers in
While wheat and soybean prices have fallen back from record highs earlier this year amid signs of improving supply, rice and corn have taken the lead in the grains complex, unnerving policymakers worried about inflation and, increasingly, unrest.
U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday announced $200 million in emergency food aid, a day after top finance and development officials from around the world called for urgent steps to stem rising food prices, warning social unrest would spread unless the cost of basic staples was contained.
Corn has staged a renewed rally this month on concern about slow
SUPPLY DISTRUPTIONS
Illegal fishers plunder the Arctic
Misty Bering Sea morning - but this legal trawler faces competition from a host of illegal boats
Keeping it legal, keeping it sustainable - a fisheries inspector checks mesh size on an Arctic trawler's nets
According to Norwegian government figures, more than 100,000 tonnes of illegal cod, valued at €225 million ($US350 million), was caught in the Barents Sea in 2005. Concerted efforts by industry, government and NGOs to clamp down on this illegal activity has seen illegal landings cut by 50 per cent, but illegal fishing for Alaska pollock in the Russian Far-East remains a problem.
While investigation into illegal fishing in the Russian Far-East is less exhaustive than in the Barents Sea, the new report, Illegal Fishing in Arctic Waters, shows that in the Sea of Okhotsk alone, illegal landings of Alaska pollock can reach a value of more than €45 million ($US70 million) annually. The economic loss to the legitimate fishing industry and public purse is estimated at €210 million ($US327 million).
“Illegal fishing in the Arctic is a serious transnational crime crossing European, African, Asian and American borders.” said Dr Neil Hamilton, Director of WWF International’s Arctic Programme. “Cheats are putting short-term profits ahead of the long-term survival of Arctic fisheries.”
About 70 per cent of the world’s white fish supply comes from the Arctic, with the world’s last large cod stock found in the Barents Sea. The Russian Alaska pollock and Barents Sea cod catches analyzed in the report together account for about a quarter of the world’s white fish supply.
Barents Sea cod is taken mainly by Norwegian, Russian and EU fishers, while the bulk of the Alaska pollock catch, fished mainly in the Western Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk, is taken by Russian fleets with China the largest buyer. With markets spread across the globe, the distribution of black market cod and pollock is a global problem.
“If you’re enjoying bacalhau in Brazil, fish and chips in the UK, or frozen fillets in Germany you could be unwittingly supporting black-market cod,” said Maren Esmark, Marine Director at WWF-Norway. “Progress in tackling illegal fishing for cod in the Barents Sea should be applauded, but the positive trend may not continue as illegal products can find new ways to international markets.”
WWF is heavily involved in efforts to increase the traceability of fish from catch to consumer, and also to improve the level and reliability of information for end consumers. These efforts also reach into the Arctic, where significant elements of the US Pacific cod and walleye (Alaska) pollock fisheries have achieved Marine Stewardship Council certification as sustainable fisheries.
WWF is concerned about the ability of Arctic fish to cope with climate change, with illegal fishing being an added stress that can reduce the capacity of fish populations to adapt and survive.
WWF is also alarmed that several EU member states are opposing the current European Commission proposal to address illegal fishing, and the EU risks losing a key opportunity to tackle this problem.
“We urge all EU countries to support the commission’s proposal to deal with illegal fishing, and appeal to processors, retailers and consumers to not support criminality in fishing,” said Esmark, “Companies should not trade with vessels known to fish illegally, and consumers should demand the seafood they buy comes from a sustainable, legal source.”
14 April 2008
UN peacekeeper killed in Haiti riots over food prices
Corporal Nagya Aminu, 36, from Nigeria, was taking food to his unit when he was pulled from his UN vehicle in a clothing market near the cathedral and shot in the neck. Several market stalls were set alight.
The death came hours after senators voted to dismiss Jacques Edouard Alexis as Prime Minister to try to calm days of riots that have claimed at least five lives. Plans have been announced to cut the price of rice by 15 per cent.
It was the first such killing of a peacekeeper since the UN force was deployed in 2004, following the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Two Haitian men were detained.
Food prices in Haiti are reported to have increased by 50 to 100 per cent in the past year. The population are particularly vulnerable because almost four-fifths live on less than $2 a day.
— The import bill for the world’s poorest countries for wheat, corn and milled rice is forecast to rise by 56 per cent this year, and by 74 per cent for vulnerable African nations, a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts (John Zarocostas writes). Food prices have sparked riots in Egypt, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, Haiti and the Philippines. Troops have been deployed in Pakistan and Thailand.
Food riots in Bangladesh, Egypt and Philippines – many other nations ready to explode
The food prices have gone up exponentially in the last few years. That has caused major problem for common people in many developing nations especially with food shortages.
Nearly two dozen people were injured as police opened fire in air and used batons and tear gas to disperse thousands of protesters who turned violent while demanding a wage hike to meet the steep food prices in Bangladesh capital Dhaka.
It is a ‘silent famine’ in the all the poor nations as grains get converted to biofuel and other food products in the chain also rise in price.
Recently in Egypt and Philippines similar riots have taken place. African nations are worst hit. Even India and China are facing food shortages and the common people are using credit cards to fulfill their food requirements.
In United States common middleclass households are seeing their weekly grocery bill is rising by 40 to50% over the last two years.
Arctic ice shelf now split in three, mission finds
CLIMATE: 'THE MAP OF CANADA IS CHANGING'
EUREKA, NUNAVUT -- A Canadian military operation at the top of the world that married science and Arctic sovereignty has discovered the largest remaining ice shelf in the northern hemisphere is breaking apart at an alarming rate.
EUREKA, NUNAVUT -- A Canadian military operation at the top of the world that married science and Arctic sovereignty has discovered the largest remaining ice shelf in the northern hemisphere is breaking apart at an alarming rate.
A team of scientists and Canadian Rangers witnessed dramatic deep new cracks, 18 kilometres long and 40 metres wide, on the southern edge of Ward Hunt Ice Shelf while patrolling Ellesmere Island this month by snowmobile.
They found the ice shelf, which researchers first learned had split in two six years ago, has now broken into three. An ice shelf is a massive platform of floating sea ice connected to land.
"The map of Canada is changing," Derek Mueller, a Trent University researcher, said yesterday at Eureka's weather station, which is fewer than 1,200 kilometres south of the North Pole on the western coast of Ellesmere Island. "There are only five [ice shelves] left on Ellesmere, but almost 100 years ago the entire coastline was covered in ice shelves."
Mr. Mueller, who participated in Operation Nunalivut - Inuktitut for "the land is ours" - said deteriorating ice conditions are worrisome and consistent with other indicators of climate change that have been documented in the largely uninhabited, frozen region.
The $1-million military mission, which began March 28 and covered thousands of kilometres, wrapped up yesterday in Eureka, which is surrounded by sweeping, snow-covered mountains. The military flew in a large group, including reporters, academics and one U.S. government representative, a consul-general based in Calgary, to witness the event.
Brigadier-General Chris Whitecross, commander of the military in the Arctic, said the Canadian Forces "couldn't pass up the opportunity" to invite scientists to accompany the Rangers, a group of part-time reservists, mostly Inuit, on the operation.
It was the military's eighth high-Arctic patrol since 2002, and was meant to test its capabilities in the barren region, which makes up about 40 per cent of Canada's total land mass.
Brig.-Gen. Whitecross said scientific research will assist the military in maintaining control and a presence at the top of the world, which has never been easy because of extreme weather and difficult terrain.
Traffic of all types has increased in the Canadian Arctic as previously frozen waterways, including the fabled Northwest Passage - an invaluable maritime shortcut between Asia and Europe - have become open for longer periods and the rush for access and control of land and water in this resource-rich pocket of the world has ramped up among energy-hungry nations. Russia, Canada and Denmark are all currently conducting complex scientific research to file international claims that they are physically connected to the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that stretches to an area between northern Ellesmere Island and Greenland from Siberia. The area is potentially rich in massive oil-and-gas reserves.
For several years, Canada's military presence in the North has been carried out cheaply compared with other Arctic nations. However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government has vowed to change that, and has made several expensive promises, including recent ones to build a new deep-sea port in Nanisivik and a new Arctic military training facility in Resolute Bay.
Whitney Lackenbauer, a history professor at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont., said the last time a federal government showed this much interest in the Arctic was under Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker.
"The real question now is whether or not this government, who are making proclamations that we haven't heard for 50 years, are actually willing to put their money where their mouths are."
Severe drought in Spain stirs up regional tensions
Faced with having to ration domestic water supplies during the coming months, the regional government of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, plans to import drinking water by ship from as far afield as southern France and from desalination plants in southern Spain. Officials said they were even considering buying water from other parts of the country and carrying it to Barcelona by train.
With water levels in some Catalan reservoirs at 20 percent of capacity, the regional government has banned Catalans from filling large swimming pools or watering their gardens and has switched off city fountains. At a national level, Spain's reservoirs are half empty, according to data published by the Environment Ministry last week.
The quest for solutions to Barcelona's water shortage has sparked an angry debate between Catalan officials and the central government. In a country where regional interests often seem to be pitted against national ones, the crisis has revived the question of whether water should be centrally managed and whether Spain's greener provinces should share water with those that lack it.
Manuel Ramón Llamas, an expert in the management of water resources at the Complutense University in Madrid, said Spain's problem was not so much that it lacks water but that it manages what water it has badly and charges too little for supplies.
"Spain is the driest country in Europe, and we've become an international laughingstock on the water question," he said by telephone. "Water demand here is falsely elevated because water is practically free."
Catalonia's regional government wants to divert water from the Segre River, a tributary of the huge Ebro River in Catalonia, to Barcelona. It hopes a desalination plant that is under construction on the coast near Barcelona will come on line next year and alleviate supply problems.
"Diverting water from the Segre is the only viable way for us to get the water we need in the time frame that it is needed," Francesc Baltasar, the Catalan environment minister, said in a news conference on television Thursday.
That option has been vetoed, however, by the central government, which controls all water that flows into, or along, the Ebro. It has also met fierce opposition from Aragon, a region bordering Catalonia through which the Segre flows.
The government's opposition to the Segre diversion infuriated Catalan politicians, who accuse Madrid of lacking solidarity. José Montilla, head of the regional government, last week declared that "Catalonia, too, is Spain" - an unusual pronouncement from the leader of a region that fiercely promotes its own language and where nationalists consider Spain a separate country.
Catalonia has long aspired to have greater control over its water. In 2005 the region's inhabitants passed an autonomy statute that awards the regional government greater powers over its rivers - powers that have yet to be approved by Spain's constitutional court. The Catalan statute sparked a flurry of claims from other regions to greater autonomy and greater control over local rivers.
In the absence of a diversion from the Segre, the state-run Catalan Water Agency has contracted 10 ships to supply Barcelona with drinking water at a cost of nearly €80 million, or $127 million. Some of the ships will bring water from Marseilles, 300 kilometers, or 200 miles, away, and others, in August, will carry water more than 600 kilometers from a desalination plant in Almería.
The government plans to spend €35 million upgrading port facilities and €43 million buying and transporting the water. The central government last week suggested that Spain consider approaching France about diverting water from the Rhone - a project that would take more than a decade and that Montilla described as a "bad-taste joke."
Llamas, the university expert on water management, said successive governments had become bogged down in politics. "Water is a fundamental problem that should transcend political boundaries," he said. "Our problem is not that Spain lacks water. It's that we are suffering a mental drought among our politicians."
Undersea quake swarm puzzles the experts
Hundreds of tremors emanate from unusual source off Oregon coast
Oregon State U. / Hatfield Marine Science Center
The earthquake swarm (with red, yellow, brown, purple dots representing different days) is located in a basin in the middle of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. In this undersea chart, the plate's ridge is the angled line to the left of the swarm. The boundary of the North American plate and the Oregon coastline can be seen to the right.
GRANTS PASS, Ore. - Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption — except there are no volcanoes in the area.
GRANTS PASS, Ore. - Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption — except there are no volcanoes in the area.
Scientists don't know exactly what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.
There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Newport, Ore. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, Oregon State University reported.
“In the 17 years we’ve been monitoring the ocean through hydrophone recordings, we’ve never seen a swarm of earthquakes in an area such as this,” Dziak said.The hydrophones are left over from a network the Navy used to listen for submarines during the Cold War. They routinely detect passing ships, earthquakes on the ocean bottom and whales calling to one another.
On the hydrophones, the quakes sound like low thunder. Some of the quakes have also been detected by earthquake instruments on land.
Scientists hope to send out an OSU research ship to take water samples, looking for evidence that sediment has been stirred up and chemicals that would indicate magma is moving up through the Juan de Fuca Plate, Dziak said.
Earthquake swarms have been reported off the Oregon coast before, including an episode that occurred in 2005 along a plate boundary northwest of Astoria.
The more recent swarm originates in a different area in the middle of the Juan de Fuca Plate, and the tremors are stronger, Dziak said. Also, the quakes have not followed the typical pattern of a major shock followed by a series of diminishing aftershocks, and few have been strong enough to be felt on shore.
“The fact that it’s taking place in the middle of the plate, and not a boundary, is puzzling,” he told The Register-Guard in Eugene. “It’s something worth keeping an eye on.”
Earth's crust is made up of plates that rest on molten rock, which are rubbing together. When the molten rock, or magma, erupts through the crust, it creates volcanoes.
That can happen in the middle of a plate. When the plates lurch against each other, they create earthquakes along the edges.
In this case, the Juan de Fuca Plate is a small piece of crust being crushed between the Pacific Plate and North America, Dziak said.
World Bank echoes food cost alarm
The rapid rise in food prices could push 100 million people in poor countries deeper into poverty, World Bank head, Robert Zoellick, has said.
His warning follows that from the leader of the International Monetary Fund, who said hundreds of thousands of people were at risk of starvation.
Mr Zoellick proposed an action plan to boost long-run agricultural production.
There have been food riots recently in a number of countries, including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt.
"Based on a rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty," Mr Zoellick said.
His proposal for a "new deal" to tackle the international food crisis was endorsed by the World Bank's steering committee of finance and development ministers at a meeting in Washington.
The World Bank and its sister organisation, the IMF have held a weekend of meetings that addressed rising food and energy prices as well as the credit crisis upsetting global financial markets.
Spiralling inflation
Food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather in some countries that has ruined crops and an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels.
 | GLOBAL FOOD PRICE RISES  Wheat: 130% Soya: 87% Rice: 74% Corn: 31% Time: Year to March 2008 Source: Bloomberg  |
The price of staple crops such as wheat, rice and corn have all risen, leading to an increase in overall food prices of 83% in the last three years, the World Bank has said.
The sharp rises have led to protests and unrest in many countries, including Egypt, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
In Haiti, protests last week turned violent, leading to the deaths of five people and the fall of the government.
Restrictions on rice exports have been put in place in major producing countries such as India, China, Vietnam and Egypt.
Importers such as Bangladesh, the Philippines and Afghanistan have been hit hard.
"We have to put out money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths," Mr Zoellick said. "It's as stark as that."
He called for more aid to provide food to needy people in poor countries and help for small farmers. He said the World Bank was working to provide money for seeds for planting in the new season.
He also urged wealthy donor countries to quickly fill the World Food Programme's estimated $500m (£250m) funding shortfall.
Mr Zoellick's "New Deal for Global Food Policy" also seeks to boost agricultural policy in poor countries in the longer-term.
On Saturday, the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned of mass starvation and other dire consequences if food prices continue to rise sharply.
"As we know, learning from the past, those kind of questions sometimes end in war," he said.
He said the problem could lead to trade imbalances that may eventually affect developed nations, "so it is not only a humanitarian question".
13 April 2008
World food riots spread
Food for thought: World Bank president Robert Zoellick holds up a bag of rice and a loaf of bread at a news conference during the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington this week Picture:
Manuel calls for calm, while Vavi warns of looming crisis in South Africa.
“Don’t panic,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel urged yesterday as food riots spread around the world.
While global financial leaders have declared an international food emergency, South African labour federation, Cosatu, planned country-wide protests against price collusion and rampant inflation in the country’s food industry. The ruling ANC has also called on the Competition Commission to investigate the causes of high food prices. The price of a loaf of bread in September this year is likely to be at least 25% higher than it was a year ago.
Speaking to Business Times from the annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, Manuel branded the behaviour of some richer countries who subsidise farmers to produce cereals for biofuel rather than for food as “criminal”.
He urged Opec, the oil producers’ cartel, to slash the incentive to divert food to fuel by pumping more oil.
He said the current economic squeeze, which has forced the Treasury to lower the growth forecast to 4% of GDP this year, would not interfere with the social safety net on which at least one in five South Africans rely to stay alive. ContinueFood riots to worsen without global action: UN
View Larger ImageHaitians sell rice and beans in a street market in Port-au-Prince this week. Vendors and shoppers returned to the debris-strewn streets of the Haitian capital after the president appealed for an end to food riots.
ROME - Food riots in developing countries will spread unless world leaders take major steps to reduce prices for the poor, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday.
Despite a forecast 2.6-per-cent hike in global cereal output this year, record prices are unlikely to fall, forcing poorer countries' food import bills up 56 per cent and hungry people on to the streets, FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said.
"The reality is that people are dying already in the riots," Diouf told a news conference.
"They are dying because of their reaction to the situation and if we don't take the necessary action there is certainly the possibility that they might die of starvation. Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react."
The FAO said food riots had broken out in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti. Thirty-seven countries face food crises, it said in its latest World Food Situation report.
Some of the worst tensions have been in Haiti, where protests at the high cost of living descended into riots. Four people were killed in clashes with security forces.
There is concern about rising prices in the Philippines, but it was not clear what incidents FAO was referring to there.
"I am surprised that I have not been summoned to the UN Security Council as many of the problems being discussed there would not have the same consequences on peace, security and human rights (without the food crisis)," Diouf said.
Increased food demand from rapidly developing countries such as China and India, the use of crops for biofuels, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are all blamed for pushing prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice to record highs.
While people in richer countries have noticed higher supermarket prices, the effect is far more pronounced in developing countries where 50-60 per cent of income goes to food, compared with just 10-20 per cent in the developed world.
FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT
Diouf called on heads of state and government to attend a food crisis summit at FAO headquarters in Rome on June 3-5.
He said the priority was a "massive seed transfer" -- to ensure farmers in poor countries could buy seeds, fertilizer and feed at prices they could afford.
Other necessary measures include creating financial mechanisms to ensure poorer food importing countries could continue to buy the food they need and give a larger proportion of aid budgets to agriculture, Diouf said.
The comments echoed those of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who called this week for a coordinated response to the food crisis which would include reaching a deal on the Doha trade talks and the possible use of market-based risk management instruments to avert food price volatility.
Diouf said it was normal to expect developing countries to put controls on food exports, even if that exacerbated global food prices.
The price of rice jumped 40 per cent in three days recently when India and Vietnam banned exports, an FAO official said.
"Export bans are a normal reaction for any government that has a prime responsibility to its people," he said.
Expanded crop plantings this year should mean a 2.6-per-cent increase in cereal output, with wheat up 6.8 per cent on last year, FAO has forecast.
But with only a small proportion of that reaching the open market, the effect on prices will be negligible as other prices pressure remain, it said.
China drought leaves 670,000 without drinking water
A drought in China's north-east Liaoning province has left nearly 700,000 people without drinking water after rainfall in the first three months of 2008 tumbled to one-fifth levels last year, the Xinhua agency said.
The area is a top grain producer, and maize and rice farming is due to begin next week, but from January to the end of March it had got less than 2 centimetres of rain.
Some 66 reservoirs have dried up, but the area has raised cash to build 1,700 new wells and expand and upgrade water conservation systems to try and ensure spring planting can go ahead, Xinhua said, citing local sources.
China's weather administration said in early April that drought parching other parts of northern China was the worst in several decades and would continue this month.
Drought and floods are perennial problems in China, which has per capita water resources that are well below the global average. Its meteorologists have said global climate change is exacerbating extreme weather, including droughts.
About 30 million Chinese in the countryside and more than 20 million in urban areas face drinking water shortages every year despite huge government investment to address the problem.
IMF head gives food price warning
The IMF's Strauss-Kahn wants strong action on food price inflation
Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that social unrest from continuing food price inflation could cause conflict.
There have been food riots recently in a number of countries, including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt.
Meeting in Washington, the IMF called for strong action on food prices and the international financial crisis.
Market turmoil
Although the problems in global credit markets were the main focus of the meeting of the IMF's steering committee of finance ministers from 24 countries, Mr Strauss-Kahn warned of dire consequences from continued food price rises.
"Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will be starving. Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives," he told reporters.
He said the problem could lead to trade imbalances that may eventually affect developed nations, "so it is not only a humanitarian question".
Food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather in some countries and an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels.
The steering committee also called for "strong action" among its 185 members to deal with "the still unfolding financial market turmoil and... the potential worsening" of housing markets and the credit crunch.
The finance ministers did not dissent from the IMF's previous forecast that only a moderate slowdown in world economic growth is the most likely outcome over the next year or two.U.S. Agriculture Begins its Move to Mexico
Story HERE
The law of unintended consequences is at work. Anti-immigrant groups claiming they are anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigrants, but have succeeded in turning Congress against any thought of allowing (legal) temporary agricultural guest workers to enter the United States for the seasonal planting and harvesting of U.S. crops, is having its effects – not enough workers.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs who once announced in his patented scowling manner, “I am sick of hearing there aren’t enough Americans to do the work illegal aliens do,” is now nowhere to be heard regarding the drastic labor shortage facing farmers throughout the United States.
In Pennsylvania the largest grower of tomatoes and other crops this March has called it quits. Unable to get enough workers, the doors are closing on the business. So this summer, Pennsylvanians will have to import most of their vegetables from somewhere else – like Mexico.
The Mexican government has quietly dusted off a plan from the 1980s that called for promoting agri-maquilas, wherein U.S. farmers would be invited to start growing operations in Mexico to eliminate the border crossing of so many of their citizens, but were rebuffed by U.S. growers due to the ease of hiring illegal border crossers.
Mexico’s invitation is now beginning to pay off. From less than $20-million in 2005, annual foreign investment in the agricultural sector surpassed $62 million in 2007 with 95 percent of the amount from the United States. And the dollar amount investment growth is expected to continue, as the 2008 investment is well ahead of last year’s.
According to Reforma news service, Israel Camacho, undersecretary for Baja California’s agricultural department said that in Baja California alone 17 new U.S. enterprises have arranged with Mexican agricultural producers for the cultivation of horticultural products and vegetables. Adding, the Mexicans supply the land, water and labor, and the foreigners supply money, seed and other implements. They are coming to Mexico because of cheap labor and more are going to come.
The same story is being heard in the states of Sonora, abutting Arizona, and in the central states of Mexico – Jalisco, Guanajuato, Queretaro and the Pacific Coast states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. These states have historically provided a large segment of the illegal immigrants to the United States, so for U.S. farmers settling in those states provides a “stay home, we’ll bring the work to you.” Other states such as Michoacan and Oaxaca have also been providers of large numbers of illegal immigrants. Their promotional departments are now gearing up to begin their own campaigns to attract agri-investment.
It is not in the best interest of the United States to become dependent on foreign countries for basic food supplies. Such rhetoric like Dobbs’, Congressmen Tancredo’s, Bilbray’s, and Hunter’s “lets build a fence across the US to keep them out,” have prevailed with the news media and halls of Congress, is now creating the “foreign dependency on food” to be added to the growing list of “dependency” products.
What did they expect would happen? Did they really think that the simplistic ideas they champion would stop illegal immigration and Americans would jump at the chance to work in agricultural fields?
If they did truly believe this, their simplistic ideas are the result of simple minds. But fear not, they will now switch over to the simplistic excuse that they had nothing to do with making the United States dependent of foreign cultivated food – and of course, it’s Mexico’s fault for promoting such investment and that damned NAFTA taking jobs from Americans in one more sector.
The law of unintended consequences is at work. Anti-immigrant groups claiming they are anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigrants, but have succeeded in turning Congress against any thought of allowing (legal) temporary agricultural guest workers to enter the United States for the seasonal planting and harvesting of U.S. crops, is having its effects – not enough workers.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs who once announced in his patented scowling manner, “I am sick of hearing there aren’t enough Americans to do the work illegal aliens do,” is now nowhere to be heard regarding the drastic labor shortage facing farmers throughout the United States.
In Pennsylvania the largest grower of tomatoes and other crops this March has called it quits. Unable to get enough workers, the doors are closing on the business. So this summer, Pennsylvanians will have to import most of their vegetables from somewhere else – like Mexico.
The Mexican government has quietly dusted off a plan from the 1980s that called for promoting agri-maquilas, wherein U.S. farmers would be invited to start growing operations in Mexico to eliminate the border crossing of so many of their citizens, but were rebuffed by U.S. growers due to the ease of hiring illegal border crossers.
Mexico’s invitation is now beginning to pay off. From less than $20-million in 2005, annual foreign investment in the agricultural sector surpassed $62 million in 2007 with 95 percent of the amount from the United States. And the dollar amount investment growth is expected to continue, as the 2008 investment is well ahead of last year’s.
According to Reforma news service, Israel Camacho, undersecretary for Baja California’s agricultural department said that in Baja California alone 17 new U.S. enterprises have arranged with Mexican agricultural producers for the cultivation of horticultural products and vegetables. Adding, the Mexicans supply the land, water and labor, and the foreigners supply money, seed and other implements. They are coming to Mexico because of cheap labor and more are going to come.
The same story is being heard in the states of Sonora, abutting Arizona, and in the central states of Mexico – Jalisco, Guanajuato, Queretaro and the Pacific Coast states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. These states have historically provided a large segment of the illegal immigrants to the United States, so for U.S. farmers settling in those states provides a “stay home, we’ll bring the work to you.” Other states such as Michoacan and Oaxaca have also been providers of large numbers of illegal immigrants. Their promotional departments are now gearing up to begin their own campaigns to attract agri-investment.
It is not in the best interest of the United States to become dependent on foreign countries for basic food supplies. Such rhetoric like Dobbs’, Congressmen Tancredo’s, Bilbray’s, and Hunter’s “lets build a fence across the US to keep them out,” have prevailed with the news media and halls of Congress, is now creating the “foreign dependency on food” to be added to the growing list of “dependency” products.
What did they expect would happen? Did they really think that the simplistic ideas they champion would stop illegal immigration and Americans would jump at the chance to work in agricultural fields?
If they did truly believe this, their simplistic ideas are the result of simple minds. But fear not, they will now switch over to the simplistic excuse that they had nothing to do with making the United States dependent of foreign cultivated food – and of course, it’s Mexico’s fault for promoting such investment and that damned NAFTA taking jobs from Americans in one more sector.
12 April 2008
Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bites
Across the world a crisis is unfolding at alarming speed. Climate change, China's increasing consumption and the dash for biofuels are causing food shortages and rocketing prices - sparking riots in cities from the Caribbean to the Far East. Robin McKie and Heather Stewart report on the millions facing starvation - and the growing threat to global security.
It is the constant sensation of hunger that makes Kamla Devi so angry. She argues with shopkeepers in New Delhi over prices and quarrels with her husband, a casual labourer, over his wages - about 50 rupees (60p) a day.
'When I go to the market and see how little I can get for my money, it makes me want to hit the shopkeepers and thrash the government,' she says. A few months ago, Kamla - who is 42 - decided she and her husband could no longer afford to eat twice a day. The couple, who have already sent their two teenage sons to live with more prosperous relatives, now exist on only one daily meal. At midday Kamla cooks a dozen roti (a round, flat Indian bread) with some vegetables fried with onions and spices. If there are some left, they will eat them at night. The only other sustenance that the couple have are occasional cups of sugared tea.
'My husband and I would argue every night. In the end he told me it wouldn't make his wages grow larger. Instead we went down to one meal a day to cut costs.'
It is a grim, unsettling story. Yet it is certainly not an exceptional one. Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the imminent prospect of starvation. The spectre of catastrophe now looms over much of the planet.
In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.
For the Devi family, and hundreds of millions of others like them, the impact has been calamitous, as Robert Zoellick, the World Bank President, warned at this weekend's G7 meeting in Washington. Brandishing a bag of rice, he told startled delegates from the world's richest nations that the world was now perched at the edge of catastrophe.
'This is not just about meals forgone today, or about increasing social unrest, it is about lost learning potential for children and adults in the future, stunted intellectual and physical growth,' he said. Without urgent action to resolve the crisis, he added, the fight against poverty could be set back by seven years.
Not surprisingly, these swiftly rising prices have unleashed serious political unrest in many places. In Dhaka yesterday 10,000 Bangladeshi textile workers clashed with police. Dozens were injured, including 20 policemen, in a protest triggered by food costs that was eventually quelled by baton charges and teargas. In Haiti, demonstrators recently tried to storm the presidential palace after prices of staple foods leaped 50 per cent.
In Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Cameroon there have been demonstrations, sometimes involving fatalities, as starving, desperate people have taken to the streets. And in Vietnam the new crime of rice rustling - in which crops are stripped at night from fields by raiders - has led to the banning of all harvesting machines from roads after sunset and to farmers, armed with shotguns, camping around their fields 24 hours a day.
But what are the factors that led to this global unrest? What has triggered the price rises that have put the world's basic foodstuffs out of reach for a rising fraction of its population? And what measures must be taken by politicians, world leaders and monetary chiefs to rectify the crisis? Not surprisingly, the first two of these questions tend to be the easier ones to answer. Economists and financiers point to a number of factors that have combined to create the current crisis, a perfect storm in which several apparently unconnected events come together with disastrous effects.
One key issue highlighted at the G7 meeting was the decision by the US government, made several years ago, to give domestic subsidies to its farmers so that they could grow corn that can then be fermented and distilled into ethanol, a biofuel which can be mixed with petrol. This policy helps limit US dependence on oil imports and also gives support to the nation's farmers. However, by taking over land - about 20 million acres so far in the United States - that would otherwise have been used to grow wheat and other food crops, US food production has dropped dramatically. Prices of wheat, soya and other crops have been pushed up significantly as a result.
Other nations, including Argentina, Canada and some European countries, have adopted similar, but more restrained, biofuel policies. But without mentioning any countries by name, Zoellick clearly pointed the finger of blame at the US. Everyone should 'look closely at the effects of the dash for biofuels', he said. 'I would hope that countries that, for whatever reason, energy security and others, have emphasised biofuel development will be particularly sensitive to the call to meet the emergency needs for people who may not have enough food to eat.'
This point has also been stressed recently by the UK government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington. 'It is very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food,' he said. 'The supply of food really isn't keeping up.'
For his part, Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary - asked about the impact of US energy policies on food prices on Friday - tried to bat away the question. 'This is a complex area, with a number of causes,' he told reporters. The first priority, he added, was to get food supplies to people who need them, before considering the longer-term reasons for the rising prices.
It was not a point shared by the chief of staff in the United Nations trade and development division, Taffere Tesfachew, who flew to London last week ahead of a vital meeting of the leaders of the world's poorest nations in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Instead of an agenda designed to achieve economic progress in the developing world, the meeting will instead focus on the pressing issue of food. Tesfachew said that decades of aid has been skewed to ambitious industrialisation programmes and that the World Bank and others have failed to invest in the agricultural sector. 'We believe these high food prices won't disappear in the next two years, so now is the time to redress imbalances in terms of ethanol subsidies,' he said.
Zoellick was also clear that action was now urgently needed. 'In the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day,' added Zoellick, who made an impassioned plea to the world's rich nations to provide emergency help, including $500m in extra funding to the UN World Food Programme.
This call was backed by finance ministers from the G24, who represent the leading developing countries, who also demanded extra cash to help cushion the poor against the shock of rising food prices. As well as causing hunger and malnutrition, the rising cost of basic foodstuffs risks blowing a hole in the budgets of food-importing countries, many of them in Africa, they argued.
As to the other factors that have combined to trigger the current food crisis, experts also point to the connected issue of climate change. As the levels of carbon dioxide rise in the atmosphere, meteorologists have warned that weather patterns are becoming increasingly disturbed, causing devastation in many areas. For several consecutive years, Australia - once a prime grower of wheat - has found its production ruined by drought, for example. Scarcity, particularly on Asia's grain markets, has then driven up prices even further.
Some campaigners see climate change as the most pressing challenge facing the world while others now say that biofuels - grown to offset fossil fuel use - is taking food out of the mouths of some of the world's poorest people. The net result will be eco-warriers battling with poverty campaigners for the moral high ground.
On top of these issues, there is the growing wealth of China and its 1 billion inhabitants. Once the possessor of a relatively poor rural economy, China has becoming increasingly industrialised and its middle classes have swelled in numbers.
One impact has been to trigger a doubling in meat consumption, particularly pork. As the country's farmers have sought to feed more and more pigs, more and more grain has been bought by them. However, China has only 7 per cent of the world's arable land and that figure is shrinking as farmland has been ravaged by pollution and water shortages.
The net result has been to decrease domestic supplies of grain just as demand for it has started to boom. Again the impact has struck worst in the Third World, with wheat and other grain prices soaring.
And finally there is the issue of vegetable oils. Soya and palm oils are a major source of calories in Asia. But flooding in Malaysia and a drought in Indonesia have limited supplies.
In addition, these oils are now being sought as bio-diesel, which is used as a direct substitute for diesel in many countries, including Australia. The impact has been all too familiar: an alarming drop in supplies for the people of the Third World as prices of this basic commodity have soared.
One such victim is Kamla Devi. She has already had to abandon dhal, a central, protein-rich dish of lentils that was a key part of her family's diet for several months. Now the cooking of fried food - in particular, pooris: hot, puffed, oil-soaked bread - has had to follow suit for the simple reason that cooking oil has become unaffordable.
'It has affected my health,' she says. 'The rich are becoming richer. They go to shopping malls and they don't need to worry. The problem with prices only matters for the poor people like me.'
· Additional reporting by Amelia Gentleman and Nick Mathiasson
Four key factors behind the spreading fear of starvation across the globe
Growing consumption
Six months ago Zhou Jian closed down his car parts business and launched himself as a pork butcher. Since then the 26-year-old businessman's Shanghai shop has been crowded out - despite a 58 per cent rise in the price of pork in the past year - and his income has trebled.
As China's emerging middle classes become richer, their consumption of meat has increased by more than 150 per cent per head since 1980. In those days, meat was scarce, rationed at around 1kg per person per month and used sparingly in rice and noodle dishes, stir fried to preserve cooking oil.
Today, the average Chinese consumer eats more than 50kg of meat a year. To feed the millions of pigs on its farms, China is now importing grain on a huge scale, pushing up its prices worldwide.
Palm oil crisis
The oil palm tree is the most highly efficient producer of vegetable oil, with one acre yielding as much oil as eight acres of soybeans. Unfortunately, it takes eight years to grow to maturity and demand has outstripped supply. Vegetable oils provide an important source of calories in the developing world, and their shortage has contributed to the food crisis.
A drought in Indonesia and flooding in Malaysia has also hit the crop. While farmers and plantation companies hurriedly clear land to replant, it will take time before their efforts bear fruit. Palm oil prices jumped nearly 70 per cent last year, hitting the poorest families. When a store in Chongqing in China announced a cooking-oil promotion in November, a stampede left three dead and 31 injured.
Biofuel demand
The rising demand for ethanol, a biofuel that is mixed with petrol to bring down prices at the pump, has transformed the landscape of Iowa. Today this heartland of the Midwest is America's cornbelt, with the corn crop stretching as far as the eye can see.
Iowa produces almost half of the entire output of ethanol in the US, with 21 ethanol-producing plants as farmers tear down fences, dig out old soya bean crops, buy up land and plant yet more corn. It has been likened to a new gold rush.
But none of it is for food. And as the demand for ethanol increases, yet more farmers will pile in for the great scramble to plant corn - instead of grain. The effect will be to further worsen world grain shortages.
Global warming
The massive grain storage complex outside Tottenham, New South Wales, today lies virtually empty. Normally, it would be half-full. As the second largest exporter of grain after the US, Australia usually expects to harvest around 25 million tonnes a year. But, because of a five-year drought, thought to have been caused by climate change, it managed just 9.8 million tonnes in 2006.
Farmers such as George Grieg, who has farmed here for 50 years, have rarely known it to be so bad. Many have not even recovered the cost of planting and caring for their crops, and are being forced into debt. With global wheat prices at an all-time high, all they can do is cling on in the hope of a bumper crop next time - if they are lucky.
Food in figures
93,000,000 Acres of corn planted by US farmers last year, up 19 per cent on 2006.
76% Amount of US corn used for animal feed.
8kg Amount of grain it takes to produce 1kg of beef.
20% Portion of US corn used to produce five billion gallons of ethanol in 2006-07.
50kg Quantity of meat consumed annually by the average Chinese person, up from 20kg in 1985.
10% Anticipated share of biofuels used for transport in the EU by 2020.
$500m The UN World Food Programme's shortfall this year, in attempting to feed 89 million needy people.
9.2bn The world's predicted population by 2050. It's 6.6bn now.
130% The rise in the cost of wheat in 12 months.
16 times The overall food consumption of the world's richest 20 per cent compared with that of the poorest 20 per cent.
58% Jump in the price of pork in China in the past year.
$900 The cost of one tonne of Thai premier rice, up 30 per cent in a month.
New cracks suggest largest remaining Arctic ice shelf destined to disappear
WARD HUNT ISLAND, Nunavut — New cracks in the largest remaining Arctic ice shelf suggest another polar landmark seems destined to break up and disappear.
Scientists discovered the extensive new cracks in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf earlier this year and a patrol of Canadian Rangers got an up-close look at them last week.
“The map of Canada has changed,” said Derek Mueller of Trent University, who was amazed to find how quickly the shelf has deteriorated since he discovered the first crack in 2002.
“These changes are happening in concert with other indicators of climate change.”
Mr. Mueller and his fellow researchers were expected to release their findings on Saturday. But a patrol of Canadian Rangers travelling west last week from CFB Alert at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island saw the cracks first-hand.
“We're looking at the possible demise of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf,” said Doug Stern, a Ranger and Parks Canada employee, who was on the patrol and has been helping Mueller with his research.
Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean's surface. Ellesmere Island was once ringed by one, but that enormous shelf broke up in the early 1900s.
At 443 square kilometres in size, the Ward Hunt shelf is the largest of those remnants — even bigger than the Antarctic shelf that collapsed late last month, and seven times the size of the Ayles Ice Shelf chunk that broke off in 2005 from Ellesmere's western coast.
The Ward Hunt shelf's characteristic corrugated surface, described by Mr. Mueller “like a giant Ruffles potato chip,” is now fractured by dozens of deep cracks in the 3,000-year-old, 40-metre thick ice.
Mr. Mueller found evidence of one of the new cracks in satellite images. Then he and Mr. Stern followed up with an aerial survey earlier this year.
“We were expecting to see one new crack,” said Mr. Stern. “But when we flew over, all of a sudden...there's one, there's another one.
“There are not just a couple of parallel cracks. It's multifaceted cracking going on. I was just totally amazed to see them all.”
The Rangers found even more, and as part of their patrol they measured and documented as many of the new cracks as they could. One was 10 kilometres long and up to 40 metres wide.
The cracks, easily large enough to swallow a snowmobile, presented an extra hazard for the patrol's scouts as they picked a route across the ice between CFB Alert and Ward Hunt Island.
The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, one of the last five remaining in Canada, has been shrinking since the 1930s. But after a period of stability during the '80s, that deterioration seems to picking up, said Mr. Mueller.
That suggests climate change in the area has crossed some kind of threshold, he added.
Other data on the shelf is also not encouraging.
As far back as the 1960s, poles were sunk 2.5 metres deep into the ice. Annual measurements of how much those poles protrude from the surface indicate whether the ice is thickening or thinning.
This year, several poles couldn't even be found by the Rangers, suggesting the ice had completely melted out from under them.
Pinned in place by islands and landfast ice, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is unlikely to drift out to sea, said Mueller. It's more likely to become increasingly fractured and deteriorate where it sits.
The bottom line is the vast plain of ice is now on “life support,” he said. Ice shelves are not replenished by glaciers. Cracks in them are permanent.
“You can't go back,” said Mr. Mueller. “It's broken.”
On its own, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf represents only a tiny fraction of the Arctic Ocean's ice. But its loss is another example of the slowly shrinking ice cover, a loss that scientists suspect will permanently change the Arctic ecosystem and add to global warming, since open water absorbs more solar heat.
The rapid changes point to the need for more research to understand what's going on, Mr. Mueller said.
“We're trying to gather clues as to what's in store and what's the significance overall. We know very little about this coastline. It's important for us to get out there and take real measurements.”
11 April 2008
Red alert in bird flu-hit Tripura
The Tripura Government has announced a state of red alert after reports of bird flu surfaced in two other districts of the State.
Culling operations are already on in Dhalai District.
A high level meeting chaired by Commissioner of State Animal Resource Development, V Venkateswarlu on Wednesday decided that veterinary doctors would camp in Khowai, Sadar and Sonamura sub-divisions of West Tripura district and in Belonia sub-division of South Tripura district from Thursday.
Poultry import from outside, including Bangladesh, has been prohibited, official sources said.
About 200 poultry and birds have died in Neharnagar of Belonia sub-division of South Tripura District during the past week, while a few crows have died at Katlamara in West Tripura District in the past three days.
Veterinary doctors on Wednesday collected samples from the dead birds, which would be sent to the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal on Thursday.
It was not confirmed by the preliminary examinations whether the birds were affected by bird-flu.
The birds might have been infected by pabrine or the Ranikhet Disease, sources said.
Altogether 25,000 birds have been culled in eight bird-flu affected villages in Dhalai District since April 8, when the culling operation started.
A team of doctors from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) has examined 1500 people in the bird-flu affected areas of the district since Tuesday, but no infection was detected, sources said. (ANI)
Food stocks not enough to feed global populace
The scarcity of the cereal stock is leading the price rises of food everyday. Jacques Diouf, the director general of FAO after conducting a meeting with Sharad Pawar, the agricultural minister told the reporters that the price of food have increased because of the shortage of the supply of food in comparison to its demand.
He told the reporters that the 4-5 million stocks of cereals that are present in the world can meet the requirement of the global population for about 8-12 weeks. The situation is so grave that there are reports of food riots in countries like Egypt, Haiti, Cameroon, etc. and he fears that it will spread to other countries soon. According to him the price of food has raised by 45% and there is a serious dearth of cereals like maize, rice wheat, etc. However, in this regard Sharad Pawar has said that the food situation in India is comfortable and has a surplus of half million tone of cereals.
Bird Flu virus entrenched in India
In a grave and serious warning to India since the first outbreak of birdflu in Maharashtra in 2006, the United Nations today said that the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus might have got entrenched in the Indo-Gangetic plains of India and Bangladesh. This is almost confirmed by the massive spread of the disease across the states in India.
After West Bengal, now it is the turn of Tripura. Bird flu has attacked this northeastern state and it is the fifth state of India that has become the prey of H5N1 avian influenza virus within a short span of three years. This fatal disease has killed approximately 3000 birds and this has forced the State government to implement proper steps to deal with crisis. The Secretary of Union Animal Husbandry in Tripura has confirmed the attack of bird flu. This news has spread panic in the affected areas and the state government has already started culling operations. They have said that this operation will be executed as fast as possible.
State government has announced a compensation package for the affected persons. Mohanpur and its adjoining villages are worse affected by this attack. States government has imposed several restrictions to stop the spread of this disease. Culling operation has already started in these villages like Noagaon, Halhuli, Marachara, Billaschara and Harerkhola.
Drought brings 'staggering fire behaviour'
Firefighters say the drought has brought staggering changes to fire behaviour.
Firefighting authorities say they have been staggered by changes to fire behaviour because of ongoing drought in South Australia.
As the official fire ban season ends for some SA regions, Country Fire Service deputy state coordinator Brenton Eden says the drought has created a whole new set of firefighting conditions.
He says even the most experienced firefighters have struggled at times.
"We have been staggered by the fire behaviour we've seen," he said.
"We've seen fire behaviour that career firefighters have been unlikely to see and certainly haven't expected in the fires that we have had.
"Previously firefighters would be very confident that this fire would trickle through the grassland and be easily contained - they're seeing fire behaviour where it's just ripping up the bark of trees and into the canopies."
One of the worst bushfire locations of the past season in SA was on Kangaroo Island where blazes consumed a wide area.
09 April 2008
Global Food Shortage Emergency
08 April 2008
Farmers' woes grow as unseasonal rains ruin crops
BOLT FROM THE BLUE: A farmer looks at his damaged crops after Friday's rains.
Story HERE
New Delhi: Unseasonal rains may have brought relief to the parched cities but it's added to the many woes of the Indian farmer who are already coping with inflationary pressures.
The loan waiver won't mean much to those who were waiting to harvest their crops, which have now been damaged by the torrential rains.
Several places in North India have paid a heavy price for Friday's heavy rainfall.
In Kanpur for instance, the showers destroyed almost 30 to 35 per cent of wheat crops
"There was a storm and then heavy rains. It has destroyed the crops. We are ruined," Farmers of Kurmi Kheda in Kanpur say.
And in the cereal bowl of Punjab, the rains wreaked havoc with an afternoon's downpour straightaway reducing the wheat output by 15 to 20 per cent.
Last year's severe winter had forced many farmers to borrow money to invest in a fresh Rabi crops.
But the rains have poured water on those hopes and now the farmers will take time to recover from these losses.
"We have lost our crops. It's bad news for the government too which was banking on good crops," Sukhdev Singh, a farmer, says.
It's the same story in Madhya Pradesh where wheat and gram have taken the pounding during Friday's rains. In Rajasthan too, food prices are likely to rise with the Rabi crop destroyed by the rain.
"The rain has washed all my crops," Sataram, farmer in Bhadko village of Barmer district, says
At a time when the government is facing people's ire over rising prices failed crops can only add fuel to the fire.
As for the farmers looking at the harvest they couldn't reap the government's euphoria over farm loan waiver means nothing.
Food Shortages Cause Worldwide Price Spike
Led by desperate citizens fed up with the inability to feed their families, protests over rising food prices and shortages have turned into full-scale riots, causing the deaths of at least six people and injuring dozens worldwide.
BBC News reported at least four people were killed and 20 injured when demonstrations against the high cost of food turned deadly in Les Cayes, Haiti. Protestors looted shops and fired on UN peacekeepers, damaging a UN gate. The island country has seen a 50% increase in food prices of principal items, including rice, beans and fruit, during the past year.
Earlier, the Sunday Tribune in South Africa reported that two men were killed in Cairo, Egypt, as they fought to buy bread. Similar struggles were reported in the Western African nations of Burkina Faso and Cameroon.
The World Bank said that 33 countries are facing threats of social unrest if something is not done to solve the situation. Other international officials warn that many more people will die if rations are not imposed to regulate the global market to combat the plummeting food supply.
Even the World Food Programme is struggling to continue feeding the 90 million mouths it provides food for every year. Director Josette Sheeran admitted in the Guardian that the organization is fighting a losing battle.
“This is the new face of hunger,” she said. “There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before.”
She said thus far, countries that have had food riots include Morocco, Yemen Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan.
Analysts claim the reasons for the food shortage and price hikes vary, from rising energy and fuel costs to climate change.
While stormy weather patterns have wreaked havoc on harvests across the world, excessive droughts in areas typically considered “bread baskets” are also affecting crop yields. Australia, a nation known for its fertile landscape, is experiencing its worst drought in 100 years. Australia’s global wheat stocks are at their lowest level since 1979. Continue...
Fear of rice riots as surge in demand hits nations across the Far East
Armed guards for rice deliveries will become a common sight in many countries in East Asia
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Any farmer in the Philippines caught hoarding rice risks spending the rest of his life in jail for the crime of “economic sabotage”.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia, thousands of makers of traditional tempeh soyabean cakes strike in protest as their livelihoods are destroyed and their countrymen starve. In Malaysia, where immense palm oil plantations stretch as far as the eye can see, panic buying of palm oil has stripped stores bare.
Chinese, Korean and Japanese companies are preparing to compete in a desperate “land grab” for agricultural land across the globe. Japan already owns three times more farmland overseas than in its home territory; Seoul is keen to do the same.
For Asia's 2.5 billion people who depend on rice, these are anything but isolated incidents. They are what happens when huge sections of society move into the cities, when farm productivity growth halves over two decades and when bad weather or disease exposes fragile dependencies on the exports of a few nations.
They are also the result of the harsh economics of industrial growth. The dramatic improvement in lifestyles and family finances of millions of Chinese and Indians has driven a demand for meat, milk and cooking oils that did not exist a decade ago.
The more than doubling of China's average meat consumption since 1985, for example, has created an equivalent leap in demand for animal feed.
The US Department of Agriculture believes that the world will suffer a 29 million tonne discrepancy this year between what it needs to feed itself and what it can actually produce. Markets have been quick to recognise this and the traditional Asian staples of soyabeans, palm oil and pork have all soared.
Many grain and edible oil markets have also been squeezed by what some observers believe is an unsustainable conflict between cars and stomachs. Land that might previously have been used to feed people is increasingly planted with crops designed for conversion to biofuels, forcing unexpected rises in the prices of everything from tofu to instant noodles.
But perhaps more unsettling has been the suddenness with which Asia's exposure to a food crisis has emerged. Countries that, until a few weeks ago, could rely on substantial imports of rice from India, Egypt or China are scrambling to cope with a new reality in which they cannot do so.
Nations such as Japan and South Korea that were running food economies with small self-sufficiency ratios have taken only a few weeks to react bitterly to the new situation as the world's food stocks-to-consumption ratio plunges to an all-time low.
India - which traditionally has exported millions of tonnes of rice - has decided to set aside a special strategic food reserve on top of its existing wheat and rice stockpiles. Vietnam, the world's third-largest rice producer, has been forced to curb exports and Cambodia has banned them completely.
In Thailand, the world's largest producer of rice, rising concerns of a shortage have sent rice prices more than 50 per cent higher over the past month. When Samak Sundaravej, the Thai Prime Minister, appeared on his weekly television cooking show over the weekend he told Thais there would be “enough rice for the Kingdom”.
It was not a message designed to calm nerves elsewhere in Asia where Thai rice exports are an essential part of the diet.
Amid these highly visible signs of government-level panic, Asian countries that have rarely faced severe conflicts of “resource diplomacy” are accordingly readying themselves for showdowns.
Analysts give warning of governments across the region resorting to a “starve-your-neighbour” policy in an effort to becalm rioting domestic populations, and the UN International Fund for Agriculture has previously said that food riots will become commonplace.
In the Philippines and Sri Lanka, both nations that are heavily dependent on rice imports, politicians and business leaders are racing to strike deals with the likes of Vietnam and even Burma in their bid to secure rice supplies.
Troops and special police are expected to be used in the process of distributing rice to regions where supply was never an issue.
Feeding the world
33% Rise since January in price paid by Philippines for rice from Vietnam
3 billion People worldwide who rely on rice as a staple food
40% Rise in rice price in Thailand this year
19.2% Rise in consumer prices in Vietnam last month, against March 2007
8.4% Rise in food prices in the Philippines last month, compared with March 2007
854 million Number of people worldwide who are “food insecure”
1 billion People globally who survive on less than $1 a day, defined as “absolute poverty”
Extreme winter weather in Central Asia and its effects on food security
Extreme cold is not new to Central Asia. For example, the average January temperature in the highlands of Tajikistan is -20° C, and temperatures can drop as low as -60° C near the Eastern Parmirs. Normal winter temperatures range from -2° to 2° C in the more populated lowlands. However, this year's average winter temperature was an astounding 15°C below freezing in the lowlands. The people of Uzbekistan are also accustomed to harsh winters, with winter temperatures typically ranging between 8° and 0°C in the South, and -2 to -10° C in the mountainous North. Yet this winter, the average temperature dropped to as low as 20° C below zero, making it the coldest winter in Uzbekistan in four decades. Fraught with abnormally extreme and sustained below-freezing temperatures, Central Asia's 60 million people have been left struggling to find refuge amidst deteriorating utilities and pipelines, which sparked energy shortages this winter. This winter has highlighted the need for better preparations for future winters and unfavourable agro-meteorological fluctuations in Central Asia.
High poverty and food insecurity rates persist in Central Asia following the collapse and re-structuring of large-scale collective or state farms of the former USSR. In addition to agricultural products, these farms once provided schools, health services, housing and other social services. These responsibilities have since been transferred to local governments that do not have the financial or human resources to execute them. Poverty and food and nutritional insecurity are most dominant in rural areas as well as amongst the urban poor, who are often unemployed. In 2003, poverty rates ranged from 21 percent of the population in Kazakhstan to 70 percent in Kyrgyzstan and 74 percent in Tajikistan. Already coping with the surging prices of energy and food since the summer of 2007, Central Asia's poverty and food insecurity have been further exacerbated by the harsh winter, particularly in impoverished Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as war-torn Afghanistan. Continue...
Koalas ‘face extinction’
Koalas could die out as climate change has made eucalyptus leaves inedible, scientists say.
Increased carbon dioxide is reducing nitrogen and other nutrients in the leaves and boosting tannins, a natural toxin, Australian researchers found.
This has sharply reduced the amount of protein in the leaves, meaning they must eat more of them to survive.
'The staple diet of these animals is being turned to leather,' said Prof Bill Foley. 'Life is set to become extremely difficult for these animals.'
Koalas and greater gliders, a large gliding possum, depend entirely on the leaves for food.
The Edge of Extinction
Last summer, the Arctic lost more sea ice than ever before—nearly a half-million square miles, the size of Texas and California combined—devastating the polar bear’s frozen habitat. Yet, in February, despite a huge outcry, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proceeded with a $2.66 billion oil-and-gas-drilling-lease sale that some of his own scientists believe will further doom the U.S. polar bear. Visiting the Alaskan town of Kaktovik, the author reports on this new crisis.
by Michael Shnayerson May 2008
A polar bear atop summer ice floating in the Beaufort Sea, off the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The bears depend on the ice as hunting ground for baby seals. Photographs by Steven Kazlowski/lefteyepro.com.
You have to travel to the country’s northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska’s North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.
Kaktovik, population 300, is brutally cold most of the year, and to a newcomer it seems pretty bleak: a hodgepodge of wind-whipped cottages and Quonset huts on little Barter Island, set against the Beaufort Sea. The polar bears like it, though. In the early-autumn dusk, they rise out of the Arctic water like spectral figures, soft white smudges nearly undetectable on the gray horizon. Stealthily, in utter silence, they advance from three sides onto a beachlike peninsula just past Kaktovik’s gravel airstrip. If they were hungry, and you were their only meal in sight, those cute white creatures, also the world’s largest land predators, would tear you apart in an instant. But by the time I arrived, in mid-September, they’d been dining for days on prey already dead: the stinking remains of bowhead-whale carcasses. Continue...Climate change increases cataract blindness risk
An ophtalmologic clinic in El Alto
Story Here
SYDNEY (AFP) — Climate change will increase the risk of people losing their sight through cataracts because of higher levels of ultraviolet rays, an expert said Monday.
"The three main risk factors that lead to cataract blindness are age, smoking and UV exposure, in that order," said Andreas Mueller of the Fred Hollows Foundation.
"Climate change will increase UV levels and therefore increase the risk of developing cataracts," the doctor said in a statement to mark World Health Day, which this year has the theme "Protecting health from climate change".
A spokesman for the foundation, which works mostly in developing countries to restore sight to people with cataracts, said the increased exposure to ultraviolet rays would be caused by depletion of the ozone layer.
Although cataracts can be overcome with a relatively routine operation, they are responsible for almost 50 percent of cases of avoidable blindness worldwide, the statement said.
"In terms of cataract blindness, the figures show those who are most at risk of vision loss are people with no access to services to reverse the condition," said Mueller.
The foundation stressed the importance of taking preventive measures and protecting the eyesight of children who spend long periods of time outdoors, often without sunglasses.
"The solution can be as simple as choosing good sun protection, by wearing things like wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses," said Mueller.
In a separate report released on Sunday, Australian doctors found that climate change would lead to higher rates of some infectious and respiratory diseases as well as more injuries from storms and bushfires.
Doctors for Environment Australia found that over the next decade the health of children and the elderly would be most at risk from rising temperatures.
"Climate change is already a reality in our waiting rooms and surgeries -- and is set to become a key challenge for our health system over the coming decade," the report's co-author Graeme Horton said.
Parts of UK colder than Antarctica
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Snow blanketed much of Britain on Sunday with some areas of the country colder than Antarctica.
Just 72 hours after the warmest day of the year so far, temperatures in many parts of the country hovered just above freezing while a thermometer at Palmer Station, a US research centre in the Antarctic, registered 41F (5C). Forecasters said such widespread snowfall had not been seen in April since 1989. They predicted more snow for northern and eastern parts today. A year ago people were soaking up the sun on Brighton beach. On Sunday, on the same stretch of coast in East Sussex, children wore ski coats and built snowmen. In West Sussex the snow gave a special touch to a picturesque scene as a steam train pulled out of Horsted Keynes station on the Bluebell Railway line. More than three inches of snow fell on some parts of Berkshire and Surrey and London was blanketed. Philip Eden, from the Royal Meteorological Society, said: "Britain faces another northerly blast coming straight out of the Arctic, and this weather is set to last for most of the week. Snow showers are possible more or less anywhere." In the Cairngorms, the weather hampered a mountain search for a light aircraft which was believed to have crashed. The aircraft disappeared off the radar on Saturday with only a male pilot on board.
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Spring snowstorms blanket Germany, U.K.
Story Here Where the heck did spring go? Driving snow pounded southern Germany and parts of the United Kingdom on Monday, sending plows and salt trucks to the streets more than two weeks after the official end of winter. It was the second day of foul weather for southern Germany, which escaped snow and freezing temperatures throughout much of the winter only to be struck by snow two of the last three weekends. Schools were closed — for spring break. “I can’t believe this weather,” Sgt. Katherine Storlie said as wet, wind-driven snow flew by outside the Army and Air Force Exchange Service shoppette Monday in Darmstadt. She didn’t get to enjoy the balmy weather the previous weekend because of work. “I was all excited, ready to get out my Capri pants and shorts,” said Storlie, a desk sergeant at the Darmstadt military police station. Instead, she’s the one who called for the salt trucks. Most troops in Europe had the day off as a training holiday, but civilians didn’t, she said. Some civilians hoped the weather would force officials to bump the road condition status to red, which would send nearly everyone home for the day. “My phone has been ringing nonstop today with people asking, ‘Is it red status? Is it red status?’” Storlie said. But the roads were fine, according to patrols. Having lived in Germany for the last decade, Soundita Magriff, a supervisor at the AAFES shoppette in Darmstadt, said the weather wasn’t surprising. “I don’t know,” he said. “It hasn’t been right since we had that heat wave a few years ago.” No heat is predicted for the next five days, according to the forecast from the 21st Operational Weather Squadron at Sembach, Germany. But there’s no more snow predicted either. A five-day forecast by the OWS calls for rain Thursday at RAFs Lakenheath and Mildenhall, England, and partly cloudy skies the rest of the week.
06 April 2008
Price shock in global food
Riots over grain prices call for a rethink of global stability based on better farming.
Americans may fret that Wheat Thins cost 15 percent more than a year ago but in poor nations, such price hikes aren't taken lightly. In Ivory Coast last week, women rioted against higher food costs, leaving one person dead.
In Haiti, four people were killed in protests last week over a 50 percent rise in the cost of food staples in the past year. From Egypt to Vietnam, price rises of 40 percent or more for rice, wheat, and corn are stirring unrest and forcing governments to take drastic steps, such as blocking grain exports and arresting farmers who hoard surpluses.
The UN International Fund for Agriculture predicts food riots will become common on the world scene for at least a year. The World Bank says 33 countries face unrest from higher prices in both food and energy.
Even in grain-rich America, wholesale food prices are rising at a rate not seen in 27 years. The most acute "ag-flation," however, is in Asia and Africa, where food costs take up a higher proportion of family income. And the face of hunger is now seen more in cities as a historic shift takes place with more than half of the world's population soon to be living in or near urban areas.
The food price hikes may not be temporary, according to the UN World Food Program, which sees long-lasting causes, such as spreading deserts and more demand for grain-fed meat. The WFP itself, which feeds about 73 million of the most destitute people, warns its rich donor nations that it will require more money for some time to come. Its latest need: $500 million more by May 1.
The food price crisis has created a welcome stir about government policy. Last week, World Bank President Robert Zoellick called for increased agricultural production in poorer nations while warning rich countries not to set up more trade protection and subsidies for farmers. "This economic isolationism signals a defeatism that will reap losses, not the gains, of globalization," he said.
Indeed, a government's attempt to control food markets, either for farmers or for urban dwellers, often creates the kind of distortions that contribute to higher prices. One of the worst examples is a rush by Europe and the US to devote more farmland to growing biofuels – a dubious action to curb greenhouse gases. In 2008, about 18 percent of grain in the US will go to make ethanol and, according to the Earth Policy Institute, such production over the past two years could have fed nearly 250 million people.
UN officials are split over their high priority given to biofuels in the fight against climate change, with Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon now suggesting a review of that policy. But international bodies also need to review reduced investment in agricultural productivity. A second "green revolution" from scientific research, like that seen during the 1960s, could transform farming once again.
In Asia, where two-thirds of the poor live, growth in farm productivity is down to 1 percent a year compared with 2.5 percent two decades ago. More money needs to go toward research in creating new strains of grain and toward better irrigation. Too many nations are rushing to industrialize and urbanize at the expense of farmers.
Food riots signal the need to rethink global stability and the critical role of those who till the land and feed us all.
Britain: Soaring price of food 'leads to riots'
Story HERE
Rising food prices threaten economic stability and could trigger riots, Gordon Brown has been warned.
The World Bank said this week that the price of staple foods has risen by 80 per cent in the past three years. For consumers in wealthy nations such as Britain soaring prices are squeezing household finances and keeping inflation up. But for developing nations they can lead to malnutrition and social disruption.
Food prices are being driven up by shortages of supply - often caused by bad weather - and by rising demand.
Mr Brown chaired the Progressive Governance Summit in Watford at the weekend and heard a string of warnings about the rising price of food.
António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told the summit the cost of food is leading to riots. He said: "The biggest problem today is rising food prices in democratic countries everywhere. This can trigger social unrest."
The summit drew together some of the world's most important Left-of-centre politicians, including former US president Bill Clinton.
Many at the meeting blamed the price hikes on US and European Union moves to use biofuels such as ethanol to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Ethanol, an alternative to petrol, is made using corn and its increasing use has pushed up maize prices.
The EU wants biofuels to make up more than five per cent of transport fuel used by 2010, and the US may triple the amount of maize it uses for ethanol over the next decade.
But Mr Clinton said: "What's really hurting the food markets is America moving into ethanol. People there are moving into corn and you have pasta riots in Italy related to what some people are doing in farming in America."
04 April 2008
American songbirds are being wiped out by banned pesticides
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The number of migratory songbirds returning to North America has gone into sharp decline due to the unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides and other chemicals across Latin America.
Ornithologists blame the demand for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and other crops in North America and Europe for the destruction of tens of millions of passerine birds. By some counts, half of the songbirds that warbled across America's skies only 40 years ago have gone, wiped out by pesticides or loss of habitat.
Forty-six years ago, the naturalist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a study of the ravages caused to wildlife, especially birds, by DDT. The chemical's use on American farms almost eradicated entire species, including the peregrine falcon and bald eagle.
The pesticide was banned and bird numbers recovered, but new and highly toxic pesticides banned by the US and European Union are being widely used in Latin America.
Because of changed consumer habits in Europe and the US, export-led agriculture has transformed the wintering grounds of birds into intensive farming operations producing grapes, melons and bananas as well as rice for export.
Ornithologists say another silent spring is dawning across the US as birds are being poisoned by toxic chemicals or killed as pests in their winter refuges across South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. They say that many species of songbird will never recover, and others may even become endangered or extinct if controls are not put in place or consumer habits changed.
More problems await those birds which make it home. Millions of acres of wilderness the birds use as nesting grounds have been ploughed under in the drive to grow corn for ethanol, for bio-fuel.
Some 150 species of songbirds undertake extraordinary migrations up to 12,000 miles every year as they move from the south to nesting grounds in the US and Canada every spring. Ornithologists say that almost all these species are at risk of poisoning.
The migratory songbirds in most trouble include the wood thrush, the Kentucky warbler, the eastern kingbird and the bobolink, celebrated by the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson as "the rowdy of the meadows".
Bridget Stutchbury, an ornithologist and professor at York University in Toronto, said: "With spring we take it for granted that the sound of the songbirds will fill the air with their cheerful sounds. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, fewer and fewer songbirds will return."
The bobolink songbird has experienced such a steep decline, it has almost fallen off the charts. The birds migrate in flocks from Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay to the east coast of the US, feeding on grain and rice, prompting farmers to regard them as a pest. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 per cent in the past four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.
Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist who studied bobolinks as they were feeding in rice paddies in Bolivia, found about half of the birds had been exposed to toxic chemicals banned in Europe and the US. Some 40 to 50 species, which include the barn swallow, the wood thrush the dickcissel as well as migratory birds of prey, are starting to disappear.
It is only recently that the decline has been definitively linked to the use of toxic pesticides in the Caribbean and across Latin America. "Everyone who has looked for pesticide poisoning in birds has found it," Professor Stutchbury said. "When we count birds during our summers we are finding significant population declines in about three dozen species of songbirds."
She wrote in the comment pages of The New York Times: "They are the modern-day canaries in the coal mine." She said: "The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States."
Growers are using high doses of pesticides, which the World Health Organisation calls class I toxins. These are also toxic to humans and are either restricted or banned in the US and EU. But controls in Latin American countries are easily flouted.
"I believe that if we don't make drastic changes quite literally many birds which are common now are going to become rare," said Professor Stutchbury.
Testing by individual EU countries and the US Food and Drug Administration reveals that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three and sometimes four times as likely to violate basic standards for pesticide residues.
Corn Hits $6 a Bushel on Tight Supplies
Corn Prices Jump to Record $6 a Bushel, Driving Up Costs for Food, Alternative Energy NEW YORK (AP) -- Corn prices jumped to a record $6 a bushel Thursday, driven up by an expected supply shortfall that will only add to Americans' growing grocery bill and further squeeze struggling ethanol producers.
AP Photo: Corn, top left, and soy beans carpet the rolling fields near Greenwood, Neb. in this July 23, 2007 file photo.
Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. Prices are poised to go even higher after the U.S. government this week predicted that American farmers -- the world's biggest corn producers -- will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year.
AP Photo: Corn, top left, and soy beans carpet the rolling fields near Greenwood, Neb. in this July 23, 2007 file photo.
Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. Prices are poised to go even higher after the U.S. government this week predicted that American farmers -- the world's biggest corn producers -- will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year.
"It's a demand-driven market and we may not be planting enough acres to supply demand, so that adds to the bullishness of corn," said Elaine Kub, a grains analyst with DTN in Omaha, Neb.
Corn for the most actively traded May contract rose 4.25 cents to settle at $6 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, after earlier rising to $6.025 a bushel -- a new all-time high.
Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply. And with the U.S. expected to plant less corn, the supply shortage will only worsen. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that farmers will plant 86 million acres of corn in 2008, an 8 percent drop from last year.
Moreover, cold, wet weather in parts of the U.S. corn belt may force farmers to delay spring planting, potentially sending prices even higher.
While corn growers are reaping record profits, U.S. consumers can expect even higher grocery bills -- especially for meat and pork -- as livestock producers are forced to pass on higher animal feed costs and thin their herd size.
"Higher corn prices is going to affect meat prices. If you're feeding with $6 corn, you'll definitely have some (cost) pressure," Kub said.
In addition, corn and corn syrup are used in an array of products, meaning the price of everything from candy to soft drinks will eventually go up, analysts say. It's the latest dose of bad news for U.S. consumers, who are already struggling with higher food costs from record increases in the price of wheat, soybeans and other agriculture products.
Another loser in higher corn costs is ethanol producers, who are struggling to squeeze out gains as corn's record-setting run outpaces the price of ethanol, currently at around $2.50 a gallon.
"For years, corn was cheap and fermentation processes for ethanol production came to completely dominate the biofuel industry in North America," Michael Jackson, president and chairman of Vancouver-based ethanol maker Syntec Biofuel, said this week. "Now, with corn prices well over $5 a bushel, corn ethanol economics have gone out the window."
The nation's 147 ethanol plants now have the capacity to produce 8.5 billion gallons of fuel a year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. Corn is the basic feedstock for most of the plants and about 20 percent of last year's 13 billion bushel corn crop was consumed by ethanol production. That percentage is expected to increase to 30 percent for the next crop year, which ends Aug. 31, 2009, according to Terry Francl, a senior economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
There are still plans to build or expand another 61 plants, which will add about 5.1 billion gallons of capacity. However, as corn prices have climbed over the past year or so, construction of several plants has been halted or delayed, shaving about 500 million gallons worth of capacity off the original figure, according to Broadpoint Capital analyst Ron Oster.
At least one facility, the Alchem plant in Grafton, N.D., shut down late last year because of high prices.
A new plant hasn't broken ground over the past couple of quarters, Oster said, and while producers can have positive gross margins with ethanol at $2.50 a gallon and corn at $6 a bushel, that doesn't mean companies are profitable.
"Bottom line earnings are near break-even or modestly below break-even," he said.
Looking ahead, only the strongest ethanol producers will survive in an era of ever-rising corn prices, said Soleil Securities analyst Ian Horowitz.
"There are going to be some particular companies that definitely have the balance sheet and efficiencies that will be able to eke out a positive return in this kind of environment," Horowitz said. "And then there will be others that will suffer at the hands of $6 corn."
Haitians killed in riot over food prices
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- At least three Haitians were killed and 25 others injured amid food riots and clashes with U.N. peacekeepers on Friday, a mission spokeswoman and Haitian radio said.
A young man was shot in the head and killed Friday morning during the protests in southern Haiti. It was not immediately clear who shot him, although protesters blamed U.N. troops for the death.
U.N. soldiers fired back because they were fired upon, said U.N. spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. She said the mission has opened an investigation into the death but declined to provide any other details, citing a lack of information.
At least two other people were found dead in other parts of Les Cayes where rioting occurred on Friday, Radio Kiskeya reported. It was not clear how they died. Boutaud said the U.N. mission was not aware of those deaths.
Nine people were treated for bullet wounds and four others were arrested, Boutaud said. A U.N. soldier was slightly injured.
Thousands of Haitians blocked roads and looted stores in the southern town of Les Cayes on a second day of protest against high food prices. They also burned cars and tore down the front gate of a U.N. base.
Additional troops have been sent for reinforcement, Boutaud said.
Several demonstrators have chanted in support of Guy Philippe, a fugitive rebel leader with a pending U.S. federal drug trafficking charge. Agents recently raided his home about 18 miles north of Les Cayes.
Food prices are rising worldwide but the problem hits hard in Haiti, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Rice, beans, fruit and condensed milk have gone up 50 percent from last year, while the cost of pasta has doubled.
The food crisis threatens the country's fragile security, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report this week.
Price of rice leading edge of disaster
For 3 billion people around the world that was the most important news report of today and will almost certainly be the most important story for years to come.
For all these people, the great majority of them poor, rice is their staple food. Just a few weeks ago, its price was one-third lower at $580 a tonne. The higher the price of rice, the less gets eaten by those now spending 50 to 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food.
As goes rice, so go many food staples. Corn prices have hit a 12-year high. In one month early this year, wheat prices jumped 90 per cent.
What's happening is the agricultural equivalent of a perfect storm. At one and the same time, demand is rising and supply is shrinking.
Demand is pushed up inexorably by the world's annual population increase of 70 million. It's pushed up far faster, though, by the fact that many more people are eating a whole lot more.
The big change is in China, although the same phenomenon caused by a rapidly expanding middle class is happening in India and elsewhere. In China, consumption of meat per person has increased 1 1/2 times since 1980. Beef is no longer a rare delicacy; in parallel, pork prices have soared by two-thirds in the past year.
Demand, therefore, is going to go on going up and up.
The reverse is happening on the supply side. Some of the causes are temporary. In Bangladesh a cyclone last summer destroyed $600 million worth of its rice crop. In Australia, a prolonged drought, which may now be ending, has reduced its wheat exports by half.
High oil prices push food prices upward. Fertilizer costs are up by 80 per cent. Transportation costs have jumped.
More troubling are some of the longer-term trends that are limiting the food supply. Urbanization and industrialization are chewing up agricultural land everywhere.
The worldwide drive to reduce global warming has encouraged many farmers to switch to growing biofuels. In the U.S., the amount of corn grown as a biofuel has doubled since 2003.
Remedies aren't easy to identify. Higher prices will encourage farmers to expand their output. But the amount of land will remain limited.
One possibility attracting attention is that of the sometimes controversial genetically modified foods. Many environmentalists, though, have strongly opposed GM foods for a long time.
Nevertheless, cultivation of GM crops increased last year to 114 million hectares throughout the world. Moreover, "second-generation" GM crops may be not only resistant to herbicides and pesticides but be drought-resistant and so able to cope with some of the effects of global warming.
The outlook for the world's poor remains sombre. The UN World Food Program warns that unless given another $500 million it will have to reduce its food distribution.
According to the UN, 37 countries face food crises. There have been food riots in a dozen countries in Asia and Africa, and in Haiti. In Pakistan, rationing cards are about to be introduced. Major rice exporters like India, Egypt, Thailand and Vietnam are now limiting sales abroad.
The world community has given little attention to this crisis. Other issues like climate change and war do matter. But nothing matters more than mass hunger and malnutrition. And that almost certainly is what will happen.
Crop switch worsens global food price crisis
Workers pack rice in Manila. Photograph: John Javellana/Reuters
Two years ago the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expected biofuels to help eradicate hunger and poverty for up to two billion people. Yesterday the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon raised real doubt over that policy amid signs that the world was facing its worst food crisis in a generation.
Since the FAO's report in April 2006 tens of thousands of farmers have switched from food to fuel production to reduce US dependence on foreign oil. Spurred by generous subsidies and an EU commitment to increase the use of biofuels to counter climate change, at least 8m hectares (20m acres) of maize, wheat, soya and other crops which once provided animal feed and food have been taken out of production in the US.
In addition, large areas of Brazil, Argentina, Canada and eastern Europe are diverting sugar cane, palm oil and soybean crops to biofuels. The result, exacerbated by energy price rises, speculation and shortages because of severe weather, has been big increases of all global food commodity prices.
Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, said yesterday that land turned to biofuels in the US alone in the last two years would have fed nearly 250 million people with average grain needs. "This year 18% of all US grain production will go to biofuels. In the last two years the US has diverted 60m tonnes of food to fuel. On the heels of seven years of consumption of world grains exceeding supply, this has put a great strain on the world's grain supplies," he said.
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said this week that prices of all staple food had risen 80% in three years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises. Zoellick urged rich countries to give the UN's World Food programme $500m for emergency aid. The bank plans to increase lending for agricultural production in Africa from $420m to $850m a year in 2009.
As the bank predicted rice price rises of 55% in 2008, violent protests against the cost of living hit Ivory Coast this week. On Thursday President Laurent Gbagbo cancelled custom duties on imported staple foods and cut taxes on rice, sugar, milk, fish, flour and oils.
In Bangladesh, where families spend up to 70% of income on food, more than 50,000 households are getting emergency food after rice price rises. A government source said: "One reason is that the overall drop in food production because of biofuels has prevented food being exported."
Many countries that switched from traditional crops to rice diets as urbanisation increased face serious shortages and have defied the IMF by increasing wages, lowering prices and banning exports. China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
There have been protests in Guinea, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Uzbekistan, Senegal, Haiti, Bolivia and Indonesia. In the last two months Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, the Philippines and Thailand have stopped crop exports or raised prices to more than $1,200 a tonne to discourage exports.
Yesterday Philippine leaders warned that people hoarding rice could face economic sabotage charges. A moratorium is being considered on converting agricultural land for building housing or golf courses. Fast-food outlets are being pressed to offer half-portions of rice.
Robert Zeigler, director-general of the International Rice Research Institute, said it could be months before the market got a clear sense of how high prices could go. "The whole market could become paralysed. Who's going to sell rice at $750 a tonne when they think it's going to hit $1,000?"
Josette Sheeran, director of the World Food Programme, said in Ethiopia this week: "The cost of our food has doubled in just the last nine months. We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."
Urbanisation and world trade rules have encouraged the dumping of rice and other food on African countries, which now import up to 40% of food.
Last month the UK's chief scientist and food expert, Professor John Beddington, said the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute that politicians, scientists and farmers must tackle it immediately. "Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment. However, I am concerned there is another major issue along a similar time-scale, an elephant in the room - that of food and energy security."
At a glance
Cameroon At least 24 people killed and 1,600 people arrested in February. Taxes slashed on food imports and public sector wages increased by 15%.
Indonesia 10,000 demonstrated outside the presidential palace in Jakarta after soya bean prices rose more than 50% in a month and more than 125% over the past year.
Egypt Seven people have died in fights or of exhaustion queuing for subsidised bread. Dairy products are up 20%, oil 40%.
Burkina Faso Riots in three towns after the government promised to control the price of food but failed.
Guinea Five anti-government riots over cost of living in past 18 months.
Pakistan Thousands of troops have been deployed to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.
First movie of 'tsunami' on Sun
'Tsunami' speeds through the Sun's atmosphere (Nasa Stereo Consortium)
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Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar "tsunami" hurtling through the Sun's atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour.
The event was captured by Nasa's twin Stereo spacecraft designed to make 3D images of our parent star.
Naturally, this type of tsunami does not involve water; instead, it is a wave of pressure that travels across the Sun very fast.
Details were reported at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.
|  In half an hour, we saw the tsunami cover almost the full disc of the Sun  David Long |
In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.
Last year's solar tsunami, which took place on 19 May 2007, lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds about 20 minutes after the initial blast.
Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.
 Two Stereo spacecraft are monitoring the Sun's activity |
"In half an hour, we saw the tsunami cover almost the full disc of the Sun, nearly a million kilometres away from the epicentre."
His colleague Dr Peter Gallagher, who is also from TCD, said the shockwave moved out exactly like a tsunami on Earth.
"A series of troughs and crests in pressure causes it to propagate outwards. But on the Sun, we have hot gas," he explained.
"When I’m talking to someone in a room, my voice is carried by pressure waves in the gas that's between us; it's the much the same on the Sun."
However, it was not exactly the same, Dr Gallagher added, because on the Sun, magnetic fields also helped the waves along. The phenomenon is therefore known as a magneto-acoustic wave.
Theory problem
Solar tsunamis were originally discovered by the Soho spacecraft almost a decade ago.
However, the observations did not fit at all well with theory: the problem was that the waves were travelling too slowly.
After the two Stereo spacecraft launched in 2006, scientists were able to get images of the Sun at a much higher rate than was possible with Soho.
And when they observed a solar tsunami again last year, their observations matched theoretical predictions.
|  |
"We found that the speed was probably twice as fast as we had previously thought," Dr Gallagher told BBC News.
"We've seen from this set of observations that if the time interval between images is too long, it’s easy to underestimate the speed that the waves are moving."
With Soho, the researchers were only able to take images in the upper section of the corona - the outer part of the Sun’s atmosphere.
Stereo's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments monitor the Sun at four wavelengths, which allowed astronomers to see how the wave moved through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.
"We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere," said Dr Gallagher.
The researchers even saw the pressure wave bouncing off irregular regions of the Sun’s atmosphere, generating reflections or diffraction patterns - exactly as tsunamis have been observed to do on Earth when they crash against land.
Warning over climate change diseases
Extreme weather conditions associated with climate change, such as frequent floods and heat waves, could have huge health impacts for the UK, doctors have warned.
Story HereThe BMA has warned in a report that higher temperatures and heavier rainfall may increase the spread of infections like malaria that have been virtually non-existent in the UK.
More flooding may lead to the spread of contaminated substances, including chemical waste, pesticides or inadequately treated sewage. Warmer climates may also mean an increase in skin cancers, sunburn and stroke.
The report, 'Health professionals – taking action on climate change', is calling on doctors and other health professionals to take the lead on this issue.
Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA's Head of Science and Ethics, said today: 'Our report provides doctors with practical measures they can take in order to reduce their negative impact on the environment. Given that it is the health service that often picks up the pieces when severe weather conditions strike, it makes sense for the NHS to invest in preventative healthcare and treatment for the health implications relating to climate change.'
- Author: Kirsty Nutkins.
Global Temperatures Lower in '08
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LONDON, April 4--Global temperatures this year will decrease in comparison with 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.
The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.
This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.
But experts have also forecast a record high temperature within five years.
La Nina and El Nino are two great natural Pacific currents whose effects are so huge they resonate round the world.
El Nino warms the planet when it happens, La Nina cools it. This year, the Pacific is in the grip of a powerful La Nina.
It has contributed to torrential rains in Australia and to some of the coldest temperatures in memory in snow-bound parts of China.
Jarraud told the BBC that the effect was likely to continue into the summer, depressing temperatures globally by a fraction of a degree.
This would mean that temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the world.
A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and the earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted.
But Jarraud insisted this was not the case and noted that 1998 temperatures would still be well above average for the century.
Experts at the UK Met Office's Hadley Center for forecasting in Exeter said the world could expect another record temperature within five years or less, probably associated with another episode of El Nino.
03 April 2008
Worldwide Water Shortage On Horizon
Concerns expressed in Nature article
April 1, 2008 -- ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A crisis is looming over water shortages worldwide. By 2025 more than half the nations in the world will face freshwater stress or shortages and by 2050 as much as 75 percent of the world’s population could face freshwater scarcity.
Drought: Photo by Jurek Durczak (CC)
So say Mike Hightower and Suzanne Pierce, water experts at Sandia National Laboratories, in an article they wrote that appeared in a recent issue of Nature.
Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.
“This growing international water crisis is forcing governments to rethink how they value and use and manage water, especially because economic development hinges on water availability,” they say. “Drinking water supplies, agriculture, energy production and generation, mining and industry all require large quantities of water. In the future, these sectors will be competing for increasingly limited freshwater resources, making water supply availability a major economic driver in the 21st century.”
Freshwater withdrawals already exceed precipitation in many parts of the U.S., with the worst shortfalls often in areas with the fastest population, particularly in the southwest. But, this is also very much a global problem.
What can be done to help solve the water dilemma? The answer is not simple and will involve usage of all water sources – more than just freshwater supplies as has been the primary focus in the past. Innovative treatments will have to be used – treatments using advanced membrane separation technologies, as well as treatment of nontraditional water sources such as wastewater, brackish groundwater, seawater and extracted mine water.
Hightower and Pierce say that to some extent this is already happening. In the United States, wastewater reuse is growing by 15 percent per year.
“There are other, cheaper ways to increase water productivity, such as improving water conservation and efficiency,” Hightower and Pierce said in the article. “But water reuse can help to expand these traditional approaches by matching the quality of water supplies to needs, and substituting nontraditional water for freshwater where appropriate.”
As an example, waste water, sea water or brackish groundwater could be used by electric power plants for cooling and processing instead of freshwater; switching to renewable energy technologies that do not need water for cooling, such as wind and solar electric; and introducing technologies to condense evaporation from cooling towers and capture and reuse the water.
Canadian researchers warn of new Arctic worries
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Canada's massive Mackenzie Delta is feeling the impact of climate change faster than expected and could foretell of problems elsewhere in the Arctic, a Canadian researcher said on Thursday.
Melting ocean ice is apparently allowing larger storm surges to flood into the delta in Canada's far north, a change that could have an impact on energy development plans for the region, said Lance Lesack, who has been tracking environmental changes in the region for more than a decade.
"With receding sea ice, suddenly we're seeing bigger storm surges moving into the delta from storms that really aren't any bigger than they have been historically," said Lesack, a geographer from Simon Fraser University near Vancouver.
"The ice acts as a blanket, but when you get open water you can get really big waves and swells forming," Lesack said in an interview.
The delta, where the Mackenzie River flows into the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Territories, covers an area about one-third the size of Switzerland and contains some 45,000 lakes. It is sparsely populated, but home to a range of wildlife and fish.
Lesack and other Canadian researchers, following up on a study they did in 1997, had expected the higher sea levels they found, but were surprised to find water levels in some lower elevation lakes had risen three times faster than predicted.
In other areas of the delta, shallow lakes at higher elevations, which require flooding due to ice jams on the north-flowing Mackenzie to replenish their water supply, are drying out because of the faster melting and reduced flooding, the researchers reported.
"The apparent changes in sea level and river ice breakup occurring in the Mackenzie represent the first case we are aware of where two global change mechanisms may be simultaneously forcing a major Arctic ecosystem in differing ways," Lesack and colleagues wrote in a recent study on the region. Continued...
Bird Flu Crosses Species Barrier to Spread Among Dogs
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April 2 (Bloomberg) -- A bird flu virus that killed dogs in South Korea can spread from one dog to another, showing that the disease is capable of crossing species and causing widespread sickness in mammals, a study found.
A cocker spaniel and a miniature schnauzer were among dozens of dogs in South Korea sickened by an H3N2 strain from birds, researchers said in a study published in the May issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases journal. Viruses taken from the sick canines were used in an experiment later to see if pathogens were capable of spreading from dog to dog.
The findings add to scientific understanding of how flu viruses evolve in animals and the risks they pose to humans. A separate bird flu strain called H5N1 has killed 236 people worldwide by spreading primarily from birds to humans. If a deadly H5N1 strain evolved like the strain in today's study to spread from one human to another, it could kill millions.
``Transmission of avian influenza A virus to a new mammalian species is of great concern because it potentially allows the virus to adapt to a new mammalian host, cross new species barriers, and acquire pandemic potential,'' the Korean researchers said.
The study, led by Daesub Song, Bokyu Kang and Chulseung Lee of the Green Cross Veterinary Products Co. and Daewoong Pharmaceutical Co. at Yong-in, outside Seoul, followed cases of severe respiratory disease last year in dogs at three veterinary clinics in Kyunggi province.
Close Resemblance
Tests on specimens collected from three of the dogs showed they were infected with H3N2 viruses closely resembling those found in chickens and doves in South Korea in 2003. The pathogens may have been transmitted from birds to dogs fed raw, minced meat from infected ducks and chickens, the authors said.
``In South Korea, untreated duck and chicken meats, including internal organs and heads, have been widely used to feed dogs for fattening in local canine farms or kennels,'' they said.
Dog is regarded by some Koreans as a delicacy. Seoul city officials will ask the national government to include the animal in the legal definition of livestock, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported last week.
A variant of the H3N2 virus causes seasonal flu in humans. A canine strain was linked to an outbreak among 13 dogs at an animal hospital and later reported at a kennel in Jeolla province, where as many as 52 canines were infected, most likely as the virus spread from dog to dog, the Korean researchers said.
Seal, Dogs
Avian flu viruses are known to transmit to unrelated mammalian species only rarely, the researchers said. Bird- derived H7 and H4 flu viruses were reported in seals in the early 1980s, and the H5N1 bird-flu strain was found in a dog that fed on a duck infected with the virus in Thailand in 2004, according to the study.
Large cats, including tigers and leopards, kept in capacity and fed on infected poultry carcasses, have also been infected and developed severe disease. Almost two of every three human H5N1 cases were fatal, according to the World Health Organization.
``This is an important and interesting study because previous avian-to-mammal influenza infection by H5 or H7 were not efficient in subsequent human-to-human or cat-to-cat transmission, whereas this study shows an outbreak of 13 dogs in addition to sporadic cases,'' said Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiology professor at the University of Hong Kong.
Not Unexpected
``Efficient mammal-to-mammal transmission'' of H3N2 viruses isn't unexpected since variations of the strain regularly infect humans and pigs, Yuen said in an interview today.
Dogs may be more susceptible to flu strains carried by birds because both canines and birds share a type of virus- binding site in their respiratory systems that is less common in humans.
The bird-like H3N2 virus may be capable of spreading between dogs because it was excreted in nasal discharges and caused sneezing of experimentally infected beagle puppies, the study found. The virus wasn't active in their feces.
Evidence of avian flu in pet dogs ``raises the concern that dogs may be become a new source of transmission of novel influenza viruses, especially where avian influenza viruses are circulating or have been detected,'' the authors said.
Dengue fever spreads in Brazil, 57,000 infected
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More than 57,000 people have been infected in a dengue fever outbreak in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, with 67 fatalities recorded so far, regional health authorities say.
The tourist city of Rio was worst hit by mosquito-borne epidemic, with 44 of the deaths and 36,600 of the infections occurring there.
Another 58 deaths are being investigated to see if they were caused by dengue fever, whose symptoms are high temperatures and muscle aches.
In extreme cases, haemorrhage and death can follow. Children are especially at risk and no vaccine is yet commercially available.
Rio Governor Sergio Cabral says he may appeal to Cuba for doctors to help treat patients, many of whom have been sent to tent hospitals set-up by the army to cope with the large number of people affected.
Around 1,200 military personnel have joined health service staff in fumigating areas that may contain mosquito colonies.
02 April 2008
A 'perfect storm' of hunger
Bosire Bogonko / AFP / Getty Images
This photo taken February 12, 2008 shows Sudanese women carrying sacks of relief food in Boro Medina, in south Sudan, some of which is instead sold at local markets for meat and other staples.
The U.N.'s World Food Program is struggling as costs of food and fuel skyrocket while the numbers of people needing help surge across the globe. Millions are in danger.
KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- For 15 years, he's been a "grocer" for Africa's destitute. But he's never seen anything like this.
Pascal Joannes' job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan's neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south.
Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief.
"White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235."
Joannes is head of procurement in Sudan for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency in charge of alleviating world hunger.
Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP's operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls "a perfect storm" hitting the world's hungry.
The agency last month issued an emergency appeal for money to cover a shortfall tallied at more than half a billion dollars and growing. It said it might have to reduce food rations or cut people off altogether.
The most vulnerable are people like those in Sudan, whom Joannes is struggling to feed and who rely heavily, perhaps exclusively, on the aid. But at least as alarming, WFP officials say, is the emerging community of newly needy.
These are the people who once ate three meals a day and could afford nominal healthcare or to send their children to school. They are more likely to live in urban areas and buy most of their food in a market.
They are the urban poor in Afghanistan, where the government has asked for urgent help. They are families in Central America, who have been getting by on remittances from relatives abroad, but who can no longer make ends meet as the price of corn and beans nearly doubles.
"This is largely a new caseload," John Aylieff, the emergency coordinator for the WFP's assessment division, said at the agency's Rome headquarters.
Aylieff and his staff assess the vulnerability of people in 121 countries. About 40 of the nations have been judged to be at risk of serious hunger, or already suffering from it.
The criteria include: how much does the country rely on imported food; how large is the urban population; what is the current rate of inflation, and what portion of their income do families spend on food (in Burundi, for example, it's 77%; in the U.S. it's 10%).
In the short term, officials predict food riots and political unrest, as has occurred in recent weeks in Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt. In Egypt, shortages of government- subsidized bread recently triggered strikes, demonstrations and violence in which seven people died.
In the longer term, overall health worsens and education levels decline.
"Finally they end up selling their productive assets [and] that pretty much means they will remain economically destitute, even when things come back to normal," said Arif Husain, senior program advisor for the assessment division, who recently moved to the WFP's Rome headquarters after years in Sudan.
Countries are taking steps to avert widespread hunger. Some, like Egypt and Indonesia, have quickly expanded subsidies; others, like China, have banned exports of precious commodities.
Afghanistan was the first country to request urgent help. President Hamid Karzai in January asked the agency to feed an additional 2.5 million people, most of them urban poor, in addition to the 5 million rural people the agency already feeds.
In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Abdul Fatah and his wife Nooriya raise their five children on her teacher's salary; he lost his government job a year ago.
"Life is getting harder day by day," said Fatah, who is 45 but looks far older. "We cannot even buy meat once a month."
Pascal Joannes' job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan's neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south.
Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief.
click to enlarge"White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235."
Joannes is head of procurement in Sudan for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency in charge of alleviating world hunger.
Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP's operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls "a perfect storm" hitting the world's hungry.
The agency last month issued an emergency appeal for money to cover a shortfall tallied at more than half a billion dollars and growing. It said it might have to reduce food rations or cut people off altogether.
The most vulnerable are people like those in Sudan, whom Joannes is struggling to feed and who rely heavily, perhaps exclusively, on the aid. But at least as alarming, WFP officials say, is the emerging community of newly needy.
These are the people who once ate three meals a day and could afford nominal healthcare or to send their children to school. They are more likely to live in urban areas and buy most of their food in a market.
They are the urban poor in Afghanistan, where the government has asked for urgent help. They are families in Central America, who have been getting by on remittances from relatives abroad, but who can no longer make ends meet as the price of corn and beans nearly doubles.
"This is largely a new caseload," John Aylieff, the emergency coordinator for the WFP's assessment division, said at the agency's Rome headquarters.
Aylieff and his staff assess the vulnerability of people in 121 countries. About 40 of the nations have been judged to be at risk of serious hunger, or already suffering from it.
The criteria include: how much does the country rely on imported food; how large is the urban population; what is the current rate of inflation, and what portion of their income do families spend on food (in Burundi, for example, it's 77%; in the U.S. it's 10%).
In the short term, officials predict food riots and political unrest, as has occurred in recent weeks in Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt. In Egypt, shortages of government- subsidized bread recently triggered strikes, demonstrations and violence in which seven people died.
In the longer term, overall health worsens and education levels decline.
"Finally they end up selling their productive assets [and] that pretty much means they will remain economically destitute, even when things come back to normal," said Arif Husain, senior program advisor for the assessment division, who recently moved to the WFP's Rome headquarters after years in Sudan.
Countries are taking steps to avert widespread hunger. Some, like Egypt and Indonesia, have quickly expanded subsidies; others, like China, have banned exports of precious commodities.
Afghanistan was the first country to request urgent help. President Hamid Karzai in January asked the agency to feed an additional 2.5 million people, most of them urban poor, in addition to the 5 million rural people the agency already feeds.
In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Abdul Fatah and his wife Nooriya raise their five children on her teacher's salary; he lost his government job a year ago.
"Life is getting harder day by day," said Fatah, who is 45 but looks far older. "We cannot even buy meat once a month."
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Analyst Predicts Corn Rationing in 2008
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NEW YORK — A BB&T Capital Markets analyst said Monday corn rationing may be necessary this year, following a U.S. Department of Agriculture report predicting farmers would plant far fewer acres of corn in 2008.
According to the March Prospective Plantings Report, farmers intend to plant about 86 million acres of corn this year, down 8 percent from 2007, when the amount of corn planted was the highest since World War II.
Analyst Heather L. Jones said in a note to investors if the USDA estimate proves accurate, the year may produce just 200 million bushels of corn. That, she said, wouldn't be enough to meet demand, given current export and feed demand trends and higher ethanol demand. Both ethanol and animal feed are made with corn.
"That is an untenable inventory demand, in our opinion," she said. "Consequently, we believe demand must be rationed or there needs to be a big supply response from other growing regions of the world."
The plantings report caused nervousness among meat producers and food makers who spent last year struggling to offset higher corn costs. Even though acreage was high, demand for ethanol and need overseas pushed prices to record levels.
Jones said she expects corn prices to rise even more, especially if unfavorable weather damages any of the crop.
The report delivered some promising news for meat producers, who also use soybeans to make feed. Farmers estimated they will plant 74.8 million acres of soybeans, up 18 percent from 2007.
But that might not bring much relief, Jones said, since corn is still the primary feed ingredient.
Shares of Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world's largest meat companies, fell 12 cents to $16.01 in afternoon trading, while shares of pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. dropped 39 cents to $25.57.
Chicken producer Pilgrim's Pride Corp. shares dipped 19 cents to $20.28. Earlier in the day, the stock reached a new four-year low of $20.08.
01 April 2008
India Tries to Avert Food Crisis
 A man arranges cereals and pulses in his shop for sale in Jammu, India, on Tuesday. (AP) | |
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NEW DELHI, 2 April 2008 — On the brink of a food crisis, India on Monday night banned the export of non-Basmati rice and reduced import duties on edible oils.
The government’s decision had its impact on the market yesterday leading to a four percent drop in prices of soybean, soy oil and mustard. It led to a temporary halt in trading. There had been a sharp rise in prices of these three commodities, both in the last few months and in the futures markets.
The measures taken by government to combat inflation, at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, include a ban on export of non-Basmati rice with immediate effect. The government also decided to extend a ban on pulses export for one more year beginning Monday, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters.
Facing strong criticism from the opposition with little over a year to go before national elections, the left-leaning coalition has been scrambling to find ways to tame inflation, which touched a 13-month high last week.
Chidambaram said he “sincerely” hoped the steps would cool prices.
But India faces a daunting task in battling inflation, with much of it being propelled by soaring international commodity prices for food, energy and industrial metals, economists said.
“This is a worldwide problem. Almost every country has a food inflation problem, especially poor countries in Asia and Latin America,” said Dharma Kriti Joshi, principal economist at Indian credit rating agency Crisil.
If the latest measures prove ineffective, the Congress party-led government has little else in its arsenal to combat rising prices — apart from raising subsidies, they said.
The government slashed import duties on all cooking oils to zero. Import duties on maize were also cut to zero from 15 percent, while the export ban on pulses was extended.
All exports of non-Basmati rice were halted and the minimum export price for Basmati was hiked to $1,200 per ton from $1,100. The government earlier had slashed the import duty on cooking oils from 45 percent to 20 percent and had already ceased exporting most non-Basmati rice.
D. Raja, a senior leader of the communists, who prop up the minority government in Parliament, called the moves “too little too late” and vowed to go ahead with two days of nationwide anti-inflation protests later this month.
The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also threatened national protests this month, saying the government had “betrayed” India’s teeming poor.
The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said the government’s efforts would give short-term relief, but with global prices expected to rise more, India must focus on “its huge scope” for boosting farm output.
It is not the galloping prices of essential commodities alone that is worrying policymakers. Availability of food grain is also becoming a major problem as a result of falling productivity and lower buffer stocks, experts say.
“The government needs to be serious to avoid any food crisis,” said P. Chengal Reddy, secretary general of the Consortium of Indian Farmers Association (CIFA) — a forum that seeks to protect the rights of farmers at the national level.
“The fact that the share of agriculture in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) has sharply gone down to 18.5 percent in 2006-07 from 36.4 percent in 1982-83 paints the real picture,” Reddy said.
Statistics available with the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies also reflect the precarious situation, with the buffer stocks of both wheat and rice below the minimum level set by the government.
The stocks of these two commodities available in government warehouses were 19.2 million tons in January against the minimum norm of 20 million tons. This is a sharp decline from the level of 24.4 million tons in January 2004.
This apart, the rate of growth of food grain production actually decelerated to 1.2 percent between 1990 and 2007, lower than the annual average population growth of 1.9 percent, official data showed. “The chances of having a food crisis can’t be ruled out if the government does not take corrective measures by increasing the productivity of farmers,” said Devinder Sharma, a food and agriculture policy analyst.
Climate change: Time is running out
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- It appears that the scale and seriousness of climate change is at last being grasped. In 2008, we stand on the brink of a historic consensus, not only between scientists, but in the corridors of political power and in boardrooms across the globe.
The Wilkins shelf covers 5,600 square miles. It is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula. Over 160 square miles has broken away since February 2008. The melt is happening twice as fast as scientists predicted.
It's not difficult to understand why. Every week, newspapers and magazines report the latest data coming in from scientific study. And it's one way traffic, with every report, study or analysis pointing to one fact -- the world is warming.In March this year the World Glacier Monitoring Service reported that glaciers are melting at their fastest rate in the past 5000 years.
As global warming starts to redraw the physical map, so our experiences of it are irreversibly altered. Human survival has been based on unrivaled adaptation to the environment, but plants and animals will and are inevitably succumbing to subtle changes in the climate.
Plagued by the chytrid fungus -- which has thrived as water and air temperatures change -- the Panamanian golden frog is all but extinct in the wild. Scientists have resorted to taking any they find out of their natural habitat and into captivity.
In the long term, our future is no less secure. We are already experiencing extreme weather events. The heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 claimed over 30,000 lives, while Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, gave us a glimpse of what the future might be like.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth and most recent assessment report (AR4) was published in 2007. It makes for grim reading. Drawing on the collective expertise of scientists worldwide, it provides the most accurate and up-to-date information about the perilous state of our planet.
The picture painted is one of unprecedented change. And it's happening right now. Not only are poles and peaks melting, diseases -- including malaria, dengue fever and Lyme disease -- are moving northwards.
The IPCC's latest projections imagine a world where in 2100 temperatures will be between 1.8 to 4 ºC higher, sea levels will rise by 28 to 43 centimeters and heat waves and tropical storms will increase in their frequency and intensity.
Speaking after the publication of the report in February 2007, Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, said that it "marks the end-point of the debate" and that "the focus should now shift to policy."
"If we don't," Steiner continued, "the world will be in even deeper trouble than it is today and the price of not acting will go up with every year that passes."
This unequivocal assessment doesn't satisfy everyone though. Although looking increasingly beleaguered, skeptics can still be found scribbling away in the blogosphere. Some join together to form groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which describes itself as a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government. They argue that the global warming debate amounts to alarmism.
Solar intensity is often promoted as the reason why the world is heating, and studies of warmer periods in previous centuries suggest that the sun was probably responsible. In recent years the argument has proved a bit of a hot topic with skeptics and some studies have proved persuasive.
But more recently the theory has been derailed by new scientific data. Geophysicist Mike Lockwood from the University of Southampton believes that the sun's role in recent warming has been overemphasized.
All of us are now able to observe the changes taking place in the climate and in a sense we don't need the IPCC to tell us that the growing seasons start earlier and last longer. Or that migrating birds are arriving earlier and leaving later. We can see these changes with our own eyes.
This rather gentle precursor to the future doesn't convey the dangers which lie ahead. The worst predictions talk of biblical floods and appalling drought triggering disease, displacement, mass migration, conflict and ultimately the death of a large proportion of the world's population.
The IPCC has committed to continuing the progress made with the Kyoto Treaty. The Bali roadmap -- agreed in December 2007 -- re-emphasizes that further delays to deep cuts in global emissions will heighten the chance of catastrophic warming.
Many would echo the view of the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking who believes that climate change stands alongside nuclear weapons as the greatest threat to the future of mankind.Mysterious Crater Widens to Antarctica
Crater's New Edge?
March 31, 2008 -- A new report of tiny beads of meteor impact glass strewn high in Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains may expand a debris field to a tenth of Earth's surface -- despite no sign of the crater which spewed out the molten rock 800,000 years ago. Next »21
March 31, 2008 -- A new report of tiny beads of meteor impact glass strewn high in Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains may expand a debris field to a tenth of Earth's surface -- despite no sign of the crater which spewed out the molten rock 800,000 years ago.
The accidental discovery of the glass "microtektites" in the high mountains of Antarctica extends what's called the Australasian tektite strewn field south by nearly 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometers).
The microtektites were found while a team of researchers were searching the exposed rocks atop the Transantarctic Frontier Mountain for more pieces of an unrelated meteorite that disintegrated in the skies there long ago.
"The gradiometer kept on beeping at every fracture of the granitic bedrock surface," recalled Italian researcher Luigi Folco of the Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide, Università di Siena and the Italian Programma Nazionale delle Ricerche in Antartide.
A magnetic gradiometer detects minute changes in magnetic fields caused by rocks containing magnetic minerals. The most likely cause for the beeping was magnetic minerals in volcanic ash from one of the relatively recent volcanoes in the region.
"When we get back to the lab, to our great surprise, we found thousands of micrometeorite and cosmic spherules thus explaining the magnetic signal," Folco told Discovery News.
But they also found glass spheres 0.5 millimeter in diameter with a pale-yellow color, which is unusual for glassy cosmic spherules, which are the debris of meteors melting in Earth's atmosphere.
Don't expect the Arctic to be a frozen waste much longer
The fabled Northwest Passage opened for the first time in centuries this past summer.
NASA
Entire Alaskan coastal villages are slipping into the sea. The permafrost and the vast ice sheet on Greenland are melting, raising the prospect of a change in global ocean currents. Anchovies, sardines, bluefin tuna and a host of other fish have moved north, following an explosion of plankton growth in newly warm waters and a subsequent rise in the tiny animals that feed on it. And the farmers of Greenland can now grow broccoli.
The Arctic is changing fast. "There is nothing that we know of that would prevent the Arctic from going to a new seasonally ice-free state," environmental scientist Peter Schlosser of Columbia University said in the last panel of the State of the Planet conference.
"In all seasons, there has been a reduction" in sea ice, said geologist Eystein Jansen of the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research at the University of Bergen in Norway. "The real world is 30 to 50 years ahead of the average" that mathematical climate models had predicted.
The reduction in sea ice has changed the lives of the animals and the people of the Arctic. Plankton thrive in newly ice-free waters rich with a fresh influx of nutrients from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, reports oceanographer Ken Drinkwater of the Bjerknes Center. And people's lives are transformed as the fisheries they relied on disappear.
But people also have new opportunities, including access to deposits of fossil fuels and other resources previously rendered inaccessible by ice. "Think how you might take advantage of these global changes and effects around the U.S. and the globe," urged engineer Daniel White of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. For example, efforts are underway to turn the Aleutian Islands into a major geothermal power producer, like Iceland.
Most importantly, "what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic," White added. Should ice continue to melt, the effects will not be confined to the polar regions. "The last time it was three to five degrees warmer, which is where we are heading," Jansen noted, "Greenland's ice cap was 30 percent smaller and sea levels were four to six meters higher."
And that would affect a few more places of habitation than the Alaskan villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina, including New York City. As Jansen said: "The Arctic is the key to what will happen for the next several hundred years to humanity."
NASA
Entire Alaskan coastal villages are slipping into the sea. The permafrost and the vast ice sheet on Greenland are melting, raising the prospect of a change in global ocean currents. Anchovies, sardines, bluefin tuna and a host of other fish have moved north, following an explosion of plankton growth in newly warm waters and a subsequent rise in the tiny animals that feed on it. And the farmers of Greenland can now grow broccoli.
The Arctic is changing fast. "There is nothing that we know of that would prevent the Arctic from going to a new seasonally ice-free state," environmental scientist Peter Schlosser of Columbia University said in the last panel of the State of the Planet conference.
"In all seasons, there has been a reduction" in sea ice, said geologist Eystein Jansen of the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research at the University of Bergen in Norway. "The real world is 30 to 50 years ahead of the average" that mathematical climate models had predicted.
The reduction in sea ice has changed the lives of the animals and the people of the Arctic. Plankton thrive in newly ice-free waters rich with a fresh influx of nutrients from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, reports oceanographer Ken Drinkwater of the Bjerknes Center. And people's lives are transformed as the fisheries they relied on disappear.
But people also have new opportunities, including access to deposits of fossil fuels and other resources previously rendered inaccessible by ice. "Think how you might take advantage of these global changes and effects around the U.S. and the globe," urged engineer Daniel White of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. For example, efforts are underway to turn the Aleutian Islands into a major geothermal power producer, like Iceland.
Most importantly, "what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic," White added. Should ice continue to melt, the effects will not be confined to the polar regions. "The last time it was three to five degrees warmer, which is where we are heading," Jansen noted, "Greenland's ice cap was 30 percent smaller and sea levels were four to six meters higher."
And that would affect a few more places of habitation than the Alaskan villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina, including New York City. As Jansen said: "The Arctic is the key to what will happen for the next several hundred years to humanity."
Global Warming Bringing Early Spring Seasons To Eurasian Forests
The boreal forest, Siberia. (Credit: Copyright CESBIO)
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ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2008) — With the help of satellite data, researchers from laboratories in France(1), the UK, Japan and Russia have completed the accurate and large-scale mapping of leaf appearance dates in boreal forests. Their work has revealed a remarkable trend towards earlier foliation, which occurred between 1987 and 1990, over a large part of northern Eurasia, caused by the unprecedented increase in spring temperatures since 1921. By comparing these results with the previous studies available, they were able to reconstruct the foliation trend over the whole 20th century. Their work, published the journal Global Change Biology, enables the effects of global warming on these forests to be measured.
Phenology studies the climate-dependent variations of seasonal phenomena of plant life. In this study, the researchers particularly focused on the date of leaf appearance in boreal forests. In the northern hemisphere at high latitudes, foliation depends essentially on temperature. It is, therefore, considered direct evidence of the warming of the climate observed during the 20th century, which is especially marked in these regions. In addition, it also sets the pace for exchanges of carbon between vegetation and the atmosphere, which have an impact on the climate.
Before 1982, two techniques were used to analyze temporal variations in foliation: modeling based on meteorological measurements, which is not very precise, and measurements in the field, which make for a more precise analysis, but only at the local level. 1982 saw the beginning of observations from space (remote sensing), which are necessary for this type of study. Since then, a considerable amount of research based on these observations has shown that leaves in deciduous forests in boreal regions have tended to appear earlier and earlier due to warming. However, these measurements only provided rough trends, which were averaged out considerably over space and time.
In their work published in Global Change Biology, the researchers refined their interpretation of satellite data(2), especially by taking into account the effect of snow on the radiometric signal(3). They also calibrated their model for leaf appearance based on temperature, thus enabling remote sensing observations and modeling to be in close agreement.
They were able to show that foliation had generally occurred at an increasingly early date from 1982 until the present, on average around 5 days earlier for the Eurasian boreal forest. Variations in leaf appearance dates since 1982 have not been linear over time, and have not been identical for the whole of boreal Eurasia: the trend to increasingly early foliation dates accelerated between 1987 and 1990, and was more marked in Central Siberia.
Besides improved methods, the novel feature of this work consisted in studying foliation trends over the whole 20th century, by comparing the new results with those for the period before 1982 (with the help of field and modeling data).
The major trend observed in Central Siberia was connected to two events:
- abnormally high spring temperatures in the 1990s, with leaf appearance in Central Siberia at its earliest since 1921,
- especially low spring temperatures in the region in 1983 and 1984, with leaf appearance during these two years at its latest since 1921; results which confirm that the trends observed by remote sensing should be analyzed with great care.
Earlier this century, boreal Eurasia was affected by other periods of warming during which leaves appeared earlier and earlier (for instance from 1936 to 1944 in Central Siberia and on several occasions in Western Russia), as well as cooler periods which gradually led to increasingly late leaf appearance (especially between 1945 and 1960 in central and eastern Siberia. However these trends always occurred on a local or regional scale.
The recent trend towards increasingly early foliation observed by remote sensing is therefore striking when compared to similar events which have occurred since 1921, in that it has simultaneously affected the greater part of boreal Eurasia and has given rise to the earliest leaf appearance dates in the region for almost a century. With regard to global warming, it shows that there has been a large-scale increase of spring temperatures during this period.
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