Thanks to David Epstein for this article from the Washington Post.
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This column has focused on the effects of food production on climate change. But what about the effects of climate change on food production? After all, few things are as sensitive to changes in weather as agriculture. Farmers wait for warmer seasons to grow some crops and colder seasons to plant others. They pray for rain and, at times, hope the rain eases up. The relationship between a good yield and the weather that produces it is rather delicate.

Climate change, however, is going to be rudely indelicate. The basic story is simple: Greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. More heat causes more evaporation. That water has to come down somewhere. Where it comes down depends on atmospheric conditions, weather patterns and much else. It is, frankly, quite complicated.

For full article, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content

In Development at Champlain College: a Video Game to Help Prevent Domestic Violence

By Jill Laster

A team at Champlain College wants to educate boys about the effects of violence against women. So they are creating a product using two things that appeal to their target audience: soccer and video games.

The university’s Emergent Media Center is working on a project with a grant from United Nations Population Fund to design a game for boys between 9 and 13. The project, created with support from the Population Media Center, features soccer matches broken up by narrative sections, with players facing social decisions on and off the field. The game should appear online sometime in March, and the production team will formally debut the game during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa this summer.

Ann DeMarle, the Emergent Media Center’s director, said that the group chose soccer because it is a sport popular around the globe — perfect for a game that the U.N. and Champlain hope will have international appeal. It also provides a competitive environment where sportsmanship lessons can be taught, Ms. DeMarle said, and it interests boys who are at age when they look to peers for how to behave.
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Thanks to Kei Kianpoor for this article from the Economist.
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Every crisis has its winners. A group of them is sitting in the Stuyvesant Room at the Marriott Hotel in New York. The conference room, where the shades are drawn and the lights are dimmed, is filled with men from Iowa, Sao Paulo and Sydney—corn farmers, big landowners and fund managers. Each of them has paid $1,995 (€1,395) to attend Global AgInvesting 2009, the first investors’ conference on the emerging worldwide market in farmland.

A man from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) gives the first presentation. Colorful graphs travel up and down his PowerPoint charts. Some are headed downward as the year 2050 approaches. They represent the farmland that is disappearing as a result of climate change, soil desolation, urbanization and the shortage of water. The other lines, which point sharply upward, represent demand for meat and biofuel, food prices and population growth. There is a growing gap between these two sets of lines. It represents hunger.

For full article, visit:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz

A healthy diet is more than just calories. Priya Shetty gets the figures on the cost of poor nutrition — and the scale of the challenge.

Hunger: it’s an emotive term for undernutrition. It conjures images of famine and starvation in the developing world.

Technically, undernutrition is the outcome of insufficient food and repeated infectious diseases. It includes being severely underweight or dangerously thin (wasted), too short (stunted), and deficient in vitamins and minerals.

But the world’s food problems are far more complex and widespread than just undernutrition.

For full article, visit:
http://www.scidev.net/en/health/the-challenge-of-improving-nutrition

By Robert Walker
October 16th, 2009

Today, we join the United Nations in observing World Food Day.

Ten years ago, World Food Day was a cause for celebration. Hunger and malnutrition were in retreat. World grain reserves were adequate enough to feed the world. Richard Hoehn, Director of the Bread for the World Institute, boldly declared that “the end of hunger is within reach,” and predicted that it could be eliminated within 15 years.

Today, global hunger is again on the march. Bread for the World now reports that, “The world has witnessed a dramatic reversal in the progress against hunger and poverty…” And a few days ago, the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that the recent food crisis and the global economic downturn have pushed the number of hungry and malnourished in the world past the one billion mark for the first time in history. Hunger, it warned, has been increasingly steadily for the past decade.
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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.
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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