November 14, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that shortfalls in food aid to Zimbabwe could leave as many as 5.1 million people at risk of starvation by early next year. The southern African nation, beset by incomprehensible rates of inflation and an agricultural crisis, is now facing what may be the single most severe food security crisis in the world. WFP has made the announcement in conjunction with a cut in aid to Zimbabwe, due to lack of funding and a failed drive to raise funds to increase aid to the troubled state.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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July 19, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 6 Comments
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 :: jr3o :: 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 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Corn-ethanol, long a fascination for US politicians and for the farm lobby that courts their support for ethanol subsidies, may play some role in remediating the economic fallout of soaring gasoline prices, though it seems unlikely, for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the numbers work against us: in order to produce more corn-ethanol, we must divert cropland destined for food production to fuel production, and that has a severely negative impact on the availability and affordability of corn for human consumption.
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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 28, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How many peo-ple can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “Atwhat level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at theU.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually for food and feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest of grain would support 2.5 billion people. At the Italian level of consumption of close to 400 kilograms, the current harvest would support 5 billion people. At the 200 kilograms of grain consumed by the average Indian, it would support a population of 10 billion.
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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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March 17, 2008 :: admin :: 2 Comments
On Thursday of last week, we found on the same day reports that mortgage foreclosures were at an all-time high in the US, the US dollar had fallen to an all-time low against the euro ($1.56 to 1€), the Federal Reserve joined with other central banks to infuse $200 billion into capital markets, oil hit an all-time record of $111/barrel, gold hit an all-time record of $1,001/ounce, Asian and European markets plummeted on news that Carlyle Capital —one of the world’s largest capital management funds— was in collapse, and Chrysler would shut down its entire corporation for 2 weeks in July, with no pay, to “increase productivity”.
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February 4, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The ‘Davos Conversation’ is a multimedia effort to bring online public together with major policy-makers, activists and economists, to broaden the scope of debate at the World Economic Forum. The question which was used as a platform for the online forum was “what one thing would make the world a better place?”
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February 4, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, a range of ideas from international disease relief, healthcare, security, climate change, extreme poverty, and the responsibility of market incentives, took the discussions in a new direction. Fmr. US vice-president Al Gore spoke of the need for a “marriage” of policy regarding extreme poverty and the climate crisis.
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January 2, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
2008 will be a year in which the integrity of election processes, the quality and resilience of cultivated soils, the availability of credit to consumers, the affordability of homes and rentals, and access to affordable vital staples like food and water, as well as the cost of transportation, will affect economies the world over. Some economic analysts have said the combination of these factors, resulting instability or environmental degradation, and migration of affected populations, could mean the world is facing an unprecedented level of economic precariousness.
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October 13, 2007 :: admin :: 3 Comments
Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising and begins its inevitable long-term decline. In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices. But even if oil production growth simply slows or plateaus, the resulting tightening in supplies will still drive the price of oil upward, albeit less rapidly.
Few countries are planning a reduction in their use of oil. Even though peak oil may be imminent, most countries are counting on much higher oil consumption in the decades ahead, building automobile assembly plants, roads, highways, parking lots, and suburban housing developments as though cheap oil will last forever.
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October 11, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The world grain harvest for 2006 was projected mid-year to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. As a result of these shortfalls, world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year were projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day-low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices.
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September 22, 2007 :: admin :: One Comment
On March 16, 2003, some 10,000 participants [met] in Japan for the third World Water Forum to discuss the world water prospect. Although they [would] be officially focusing on water scarcity, they [would also] indirectly be focusing on food scarcity because 70 percent of the water we divert from rivers or pump from underground is used for irrigation.
As world water demand has tripled over the last half-century, it has exceeded the sustainable yield of aquifers in scores of countries, leading to falling water tables. In effect, governments are satisfying the growing demand for food by overpumping groundwater, a measure that virtually assures a drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. Knowingly or not, governments are creating a “food bubble” economy.
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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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