Famine/Water Crises

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Global warming changing seasonal growing conditions...

Over Four Million Ethiopians Face Severe Famine After Eight Month Drought
June 28, 2008 - The United Nations is calling for emergency relief that more than quadruples the original estimates of what would be needed to aid Ethiopians who face famine following the year's terrible drought.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes said in a statement on the United Nations website, "The urgency of this launch cannot be overstated." According to The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) more than $325 million is needed in order to provide enough aid, including emergency food supplies, water, sanitation, agricultural assistance and health-care to the 4.6 million people in need.

Rural Ethiopians often live on a diet of wild-food; vegetables and fruits that grow in abundance when the seasonal rains come. This years rains were sparse, and with no new growth, Sky News reported that some have been eating the seeds for next years harvest.

Rising food costs are further exacerbating efforts to get enough food to feed the growing number of those in crisis. Children and the elderly are at the highest risk of starvation. According to the UN, there are already 75,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition and illness, and if aid does not come soon, most will not survive.

Over Four Million Ethiopians Face Severe Famine After Eight Month Drought | AHN | June 28, 2008

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High food prices here to stay for a while...

'Food to stay dear till 2012'
13 Jul 2008, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on Saturday that he expected food prices to remain above 2004 levels until at least 2012 and energy prices would also remain high and volatile.

He repeated that with food and fuel prices in a "danger zone" there was a need for $10 billion to provide food and cash handouts for the world's poorest. Soaring oil and food prices have fuelled inflation across the globe at the same time as economies slow, posing a sharp dilemma for policymakers. Earlier this week, leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations in Japan agreed on the need to address global inflation, particularly elevated oil and food prices.

"I think the statement on food security was a good statement, but the test will be on the delivery of the action," Zoellick said. "During the meeting I tried to emphasize that I feel we are in a danger zone of high food prices and fuel prices and there is a great need for additional resources."

He added that several countries had made substantial contributions towards the $10 billion sum, but funds would be needed continuously over the next years. Zoellick is in Amsterdam to attend a conference on how the World Bank needs to adapt to a changing world. He says that, for example, the bank needs to pay more attention to cross-border projects rather than focusing on individual states.

Source

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Not taking land from productive white farmers might help too...

Feeding Africa: Key Is Better Farms, Not Food Aid
Jul. 15, 2008 : To End Africa's Cycle Of Drought And Hunger, Key Is Better Farms - Not Food Aid

Hussein Ibrahim walked solemnly past tidy rows of bright green cabbages, vines bursting with tomatoes and trees weighed down with plump avocados. This modern, thriving farm _ a rarity in drought-ravaged Ethiopia _ filled Hussein with envy. Like so many other farmers across the Horn of Africa, he has no hope for his own crops this year.

"We are behind all the other people in the world," said Hussein, who tends his land in southern Ethiopia the way his ancestors did hundreds of years ago _ with rain, if it comes; and oxen, as long as they're healthy. To break out of endless cycles of drought, poverty and hunger, experts say, Africa desperately needs to modernize its age-old farming techniques. But the vast sums in foreign aid to Africa go toward feeding the hungry, and very little is left for improving farming so that Africans will cease to depend on handouts.

It isn't impossible. A decade ago, a "green revolution" helped millions of farmers in Asia and Latin America emerge from poverty with basic innovations such as fertilizer, improved irrigation and hybrid seeds. But Africa's farms, which employ more than half the labor force, remain one-fourth as productive as their counterparts around the world.

More Feeding Africa: Key Is Better Farms, Not Food Aid, To End Africa's Cycle Of Drought And Hunger, Key Is Better Farms _ Not Food Aid - CBS News

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Food there, but not gettin' to the people...

Hunger deepens with Haiti food stuck in warehouses
Sun., July. 20, 2008 - Haiti food aid lags, hunger deepens; As nation starves, aid is stuck in port or inside warehouses

Every inch of Rivilade Filsame's body hurt, from his swollen, empty stomach to his dried-out, wrinkled skin. The 18-month-old had been crying for so long in the hospital malnutrition ward that his mother no longer tried to console him.

After soaring food prices led to deadly riots in April, the U.S. and the U.N. promised millions of dollars in aid to poor families like Rivilade's, as well as help for farmers to break Haiti's dependence on imported food. But three months later, The Associated Press has learned that only a fraction of a key U.S. food pledge — less than 2 percent as of early July — has been distributed.

Even those who oversee the food aid programs say they are stopgap measures while programs to create jobs and help Haitian farmers to increase production are more critical to ending the country's chronic hunger once and for all.

Emergency aid stuck in port

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People starvin' in Africa...

14M Need Food Aid in Horn of Africa
July 22, 2008 - U.N. Says 14 Million in Horn of Africa Need Emergency Food Aid

Dahir Abdi Salah used to feed his children three meals a day — pancakes for breakfast, spaghetti for lunch and beans for dinner. Now, due to a global food crisis that is hitting this impoverished country especially hard, the family eats one meal a day. Other times they drink tea or water to ward off the inevitable hunger pangs. "They eat porridge once a day," Salah said of his children, ages 2, 5 and 6, who live on the outskirts of Somalia's shattered capital, Mogadishu. "A kilogram (2 pounds) of beans used to cost a few cents — now it's a dollar. You can imagine the difference and how it has affected our lives."

More than 14 million people across the Horn of Africa are relying on food aid and other assistance to survive a devastating drought and rising food prices, aid officials said Tuesday. The crisis is especially dire in Ethiopia and Somalia, two of the poorest countries in the world. Many are surviving on one meal a day; others choose between feeding their children and sending them to school. "This had led to more than belt-tightening," Mark Bowden, the U.N.'s aid chief for Somalia, told journalists in Nairobi, Kenya. "People are reducing their food intake ... We have only months before we go into a major crisis."

Bowden estimates that 3.5 million people — half of Somalia's population — will need food assistance by the end of 2008. The U.N. has issued an aid appeal for $637 million for Somalia, but so far has gotten about a third of that. The worldwide food crisis is threatening to push the number of hungry people in the world toward 1 billion — despite a recent U.N. summit pledge to reduce trade barriers and boost agricultural production. In the Horn of Africa, food production is also hampered by drought — a double blow for Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti. In Ethiopia, more than 80 percent of people live off the land.

More ABC News: 14M Need Food Aid in Horn of Africa

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Haitians in desperate straits...

Starving Haitians eat mud to stay alive
Tuesday 29th July, 2008 - UN officials in Haiti have revealed that local people have become so desperate for food that they have started eating mud.

The raw material for the mud cakes comes from a clay deposit outside Port-au-Prince. The mud cakes are actually sold to Haitian residents by local entrepreneurs who also have to pay for the raw material.

For many customers the cakes are a last resort in a country where famine has taken hold. While food is available in the poor Caribbean nation, prices have risen to a point that food will cost 80 percent more at the end of the year than it did in January.

Much of the population is already living on the edge in regards to being able to afford food staples. The United Nations says that two-thirds of Haitians live on less than US$1 a day.

Starving Haitians eat mud to stay alive

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Brazil gonna be the new world food factory...

Brazil, the New Food Superpower
June 25, 2008 - South America's agricultural giant steps up to feed a needy world.

Out here on this seemingly endless tropical savanna, it looks like more bumper crops are rising out of the ruddy earth. Verdant rows of corn and cotton stretch out toward the horizon—this just months after a record harvest of soybeans was cut from the same tracts. Given the abundance here in the fields, it's hard to believe that these plains were once dismissed as sterile wastelands best left to the emus, armadillos, monkeys, anacondas, and the odd jaguar. The acidic soil was thought to rule out significant farming.

The Brazilians still call these lightly wooded plains the cerrado—or "closed" or "inaccessible" land. But nowadays the cerrado is very much open for business, its fertility a springboard from which the world's newest superpower in agriculture is emerging. "We have been able to transform wasteland into a bountiful land that is helping to feed Brazil and the world," says Silvio Crestana, head of the Brazilian government's agricultural research company, EMBRAPA.

With millions of people literally hungering for affordable food, Brazil's breakthroughs in tropical agriculture may prove to be the key to feeding a growing global population. If Saudi Arabia fills the world's gas stations, China assembles its consumer goods, and India vies to staff its office services, then it is Brazil that is stepping forward to stock its pantries. The rise of Brazil as an agricultural powerhouse may be the most important story of globalization that many Americans have never heard of.

With ample sun and fresh water and more available arable land than any other country, Brazil seems to be on a historic trajectory to becoming the next great global breadbasket. "Brazil can be No. 1 in the future in agricultural production," asserts André Nassar, a leading agricultural economist based in São Paulo. "I think we will exceed the U.S."

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