Thanks to Phil Dodd for this article from the BBC. As Phil points out, there is no mention of population as a factor in world hunger. The article points out that food prices have escalated since 2006. The author seems not to know that increasing demand might have been a factor.
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One billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger, a figure which has increased by 100 million because of the global financial crisis, says the UN.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said the figure was a record high.

Persistently high food prices have also contributed to the hunger crisis.

The director general of the FAO said the level of hunger, one-sixth of the world’s population, posed a “serious risk” to world peace and security.

For full article, visit:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8109698.stm

Thanks to Frank Arundel for this article.
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As the population of the world grows, so does our demand for food. The necessity for large scale agriculture demands massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides for crops and large confined animal facilities to raise livestock. Dangerous byproducts from these practices include chemicals and wastes that not only cause health impacts on humans and animals through water and food contamination, but also degrade the quality of our waters. One of the largest concerns is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Waste water and fertilizer runoff from farms and towns hundreds of miles up the Mississippi pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Gulf, creating a dead zone. A dead zone is a hypoxic or low-oxygen region. These zones are caused by an increase in chemical nutrients, usually nitrogen or phosphorus from fertilizer, that cause eutrophication.

For full article, visit:
http://introtoeppfall09.blogspot.com

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is preparing to introduce a legislative rider that would dramatically reduce Endangered Species Act protection for salmon and other fish in California. The amendment would lift restrictions on the amount of water that farmers can pump from the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta for the next two years. But it could also scuttle a delicately negotiated effort to balance protections for endangered fish with the water needs of farms and residents of Southern California.

Feinstein’s effort comes as the state seems bound for the third year of an emergency fishing ban to protect dwindling salmon runs, and as populations of the Delta smelt and other fish continue to crash. And the move is a remarkable turnaround: Just four months ago, Feinstein denounced Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, for trying to introduce a similar amendment at the behest of California water districts.

For full article, visit:
http://www.hcn.org/articles/feinsteins-water-bomb

By George Plumb
Sunday, February 21, 2010
(The Burlington Free Press)
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20100221

Almost all of the expressed environmental concern these days is about climate change. However there is another environmental crisis happening that could be just as important, and perhaps even more important, and that is the loss of biodiversity.

The earth is now going through what is the greatest extinction of species since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. We are now losing species at the rate of nearly 30,000 per year. The difference between this extinction and previous ones is that rather than a planetary or galactic process, this one is caused by just one of the species on this planet.
Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Paul Ugalde for this article.
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To understand how the next disease like SARS or bird flu could arise, take a trip to the Great Ruaha River. It meanders for 300 miles through south-central Tanzania, flowing year-round from the vast Ihefu wetlands through the Ruaha National Park.

Or it used to. Starting in 1993, the river stopped running during the dry season. Some years, it’s been silent for more than 100 days.

The river offers water to the safari-famous Ruaha landscape — a grassland twice the size of Vermont that’s home to lions, giraffes, endangered wild dogs, and some 30,000 elephants. The river also has been a liquid life-force for groups of semi-nomadic farmers, including the Maasai, Barabaig, and Sukuma who live on the borders of the park — and have relied on the river for themselves and their prized herds of cattle.

For full article, visit:
http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=News&storyID=15205

As rapidly increasing water scarcity threatens to aggravate the effects of climate change on agriculture in the dry areas of the Middle East and other developing countries, scientists launched this week an ambitious seven-country project, which offers new hope for farmers in the face of acute and growing water shortages.

Gathering in Amman, Jordan, for a global conference on food security and climate change in dry areas, experts reported that improved irrigation techniques in rainfed cropping will allow farmers to more than double their wheat yields using only one-third the water they would use with full irrigation; the new methods have been shown to boost farmers’ yields up to five-fold over those crops which relied on rainfall only. Such innovative strategies could provide a much-needed lift to livelihoods in dry areas in the developing world, home to almost 25 percent of the world’s population.

For full article, visit:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/bc-sut020210.php

Water is the new oil, and we’re running out. How did this happen, and what can we do about it?

The lack of water is no longer just a problem in the arid West. Drought, contaminated groundwater, overuse, and more have affected water supplies from Massachusetts to California, from Georgia to Wisconsin.

Aqua Shock is a clear-eyed, objective look at how we arrived at this crisis point. Find out what’s happening to America’s shrinking water supply: the problems, the players, the complexities, and the possible solutions.

For full article, visit:
http://refugewest.blogspot.com/2010/02/water-crisis-in-america.html

Thanks to Bill Geohagen for this article from the New York Times.
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The drought that gripped the Southeast from 2005 to 2007 was not unprecedented and resulted from random weather events, not global warming, Columbia University researchers have concluded. They say its severe water shortages resulted from population growth more than rainfall patterns.

The researchers, who report their findings in an article in Thursday’s issue of The Journal of Climate, cite census figures showing that in Georgia alone the population rose to 9.54 million in 2007 from 6.48 million in 1990.

“At the root of the water supply problem in the Southeast is a growing population,” they wrote.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com

Water scarcity as a result of climate change will create far-reaching global security concerns, says Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pachauri spoke this morning at the 2009 Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN

“At one level the world’s water is like the world’s wealth. Globally, there is more than enough to go round. The problem is that some countries get a lot more than others,” he says. “With 31 percent of global freshwater resources, Latin America has 12 times more water per person than South Asia. Some places, such as Brazil and Canada, get far more water than they can use; others, such as countries in the Middle East, get much less than they need.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091006155858.htm

Thanks to Mary de Lavalette for this article.
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Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.

Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.

“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009