July 19, 2008 :: Joseph Eugene :: No Comment Yet
Food prices are skyrocketing. Initially, many put the blame on the rising demand of biofuels in the transport sector, but bio-ethanol is far from the only thing driving up food prices. New diets, soaring oil prices and climate change are all in the complex soup of explanations behind the recent development putting food beyond the reach of the planet’s poor.
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July 12, 2008 :: Joseph Eugene :: No Comment Yet
During the concluding half of the last century, the world was making steady progress in reducing hunger, but during the transition into the new century, the tide began to turn. In February 2007, James Morris, head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), announced that 18,000 children are now dying each day from hunger and related causes. For perspective, this loss of young lives in one day is almost five times U.S. combat deaths in Iraq through four years of fighting. Although these huge numbers of dying children may be an abstraction, each represents a young life ended far too soon.
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June 23, 2008 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs. Over the past half-century grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices. The situation today is entirely different, however. The current doubling of grain prices is trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some trends that are accelerating growth in demand and other trends that are slowing the growth in supply.
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May 10, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Food riots from Haiti to west Africa, Egypt and the Philippines, in recent weeks, have sparked concern among policy-makers, diplomats and economists, that the current state of the global food supply is so precarious that such violence will spread and political and economic instability could follow. Concerns about the American economy, home to most productive grain-producing region in the world, and a shift to biofuels there, could mean added difficulty in bringing food prices down.
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April 21, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The Tigray Project in northern Ethiopia sounds too good to be true. It is said to demonstrate how sustainable agriculture can lead to increased crop yields, raised water tables, improved soil fertility, increased incomes and empowering of women. The government has now adopted the project’s approach for combating land degradation and poverty in the whole country. SDU went there to check out if the project is as good as rumour has it.
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April 9, 2008 :: admin :: One Comment
In a period of roughly 18 months, the price of corn across central American markets has doubled, making staple foodstuffs too expensive for many in the region. Today, what is described as an “angry mob” of protesters suffering food scarcity attacked the government palace in Port-au-Prince; UN peacekeepers responded by firing teargas, while food markets remained closed throughout.
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March 29, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Rice is a basic food staple for nearly half the world’s population. The world’s two most populous nations, China and India, depend heavily on the grain for basic sustenance, and for economic stability. The price of rice has doulbed in the last 3 months, causing concern about potential for conflict along Asian border regions.
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March 23, 2008 :: admin :: 2 Comments
As part of the Crisis Policy Forum, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative is now planning an effort to tackle the problem of food supply management and chronic food and water scarcity in Africa. The lessons from this experiment in collaborative research will be applicable in many cases to other situations around the world, and we are open to spurring dialogue in those areas as outgrowths of this ongoing discussion.
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October 4, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world’s largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.
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September 30, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The Elders is a humanitarian initiative led by South African archibishop Desmond Tutu and former South African pres. Nelson Mandela, designed to bring the African “village elders” concept to the global village, in an effort to defuse flashpoint crisis situations and speed responsible policy-making. Its foundations are the basic principles of human rights and the experience and credibility of the group’s emissaries.
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September 19, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Water is one of the “fundamental building-blocks of life”, as is often said in science, in biology classrooms, in medicine, theology, environmental policy debates, and in cosmology and space exploration. It is also a commodity whose economic reality is increasingly defined by chronic scarcity and often intensely uneven distribution.
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