Chronic hunger: The defining human tragedy of this century

Oxfam said it prepared a study for the Institute of Development Studies by surveying farmers around the world, who report that changing seasonal patterns were already affecting their ability to plan the sowing and harvesting of crops. The results, it said, were "strikingly consistent across entire geographies."

SHOOT: I was having dinner in 2008 with a group of journalists from around the world. I began to ask them how they were perceiving the weather in their corner of the planet in order to establish a trend.
One of them, Sarah McDonald, a young woman from New Zealand, suddenly launched a storm of vitriol. How could I be so stupid to suspect that climate change was real? How could I be so susceptible to the propaganda? Of course, I wasn't allowed to conduct my poll to satisfy my curiosity any further because she evidently had already decided I was mistaken. This dogmatic and frankly arrogant confidence in intangibles is how a problem got so out of hand despite it being in the public eye. Create enough doubt and you create, also, lazy entropy.

Farmers have begun changing their crops in the tropics, where a 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) temperature shift can make traditional crops unsustainable. Unpredictable rainfall makes their choices of new crops a gamble, the report said.

Among the worst hit are nations that grow rice, the world's most common food. Yields are predicted to drop an average 10 percent for every 1 degree C rise in temperature in countries like the Philippines, where production could fall 50-70 percent as early as 2020. At the same time, China will grow more rice as the area of warm temperatures spreads, it said.

Corn is another staple that will be widely affected by climate change since it is particularly vulnerable to water stress, it said. Corn is the main source of food for 250 million people in east Africa and is used as animal feed around the world.

SHOOT: Been saying this for a few years now.

clipped from news.yahoo.com AMSTERDAM – Chronic hunger may be "the defining human tragedy of this century," as climate change causes growing seasons to shift, crops to fail, and storms and droughts to ravage fields, an advocacy group said. Oxfam International released a report Monday as leaders of the Group of Eight wealthiest nations prepare to meet in Italy this week, with an agenda to include both food security and climate change. It says that as the weather changes, millions of people in areas suffering food scarcity will have to give up traditional crops, possibly leading to social upheavals such as mass migrations and possible conflict over water resources. The report, "What Happened to the Seasons?" was meant to add urgency to the G-8 meeting and to a broader group of 17 countries, the Major Economies Forum, which convenes later in the week to try to unblock negotiations on a new climate change agreement due to be completed in December.

World's poor pay price

LOS BAÑOS, Philippines: The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.

NVDL: In exactly the same way are ability to combat H5N1's tricks and manifestations is decreasing by the day. The human race has never been more vulnerable to so many converging catastrophes as it is now, and the majority of people still take great exception to that statement, feeling it to be 'negative' or 'doomsday' or an 'exaggeration'. This willful ignorance drives us even deeper and further into the trouble we're due to face, and are presently facing.

This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world's agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

"People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda," said Robert Zeigler, the director general of the rice institute.

Vital research programs have been slashed. At the rice institute, scientists have identified 14 genetic traits that could help rice plants survive the plant hopper, which sucks the juices out of young plants while infecting them with viruses. But the scientists have had no money to breed these traits into the world's most widely used rice varieties.

The institute is the world's main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half the world's people.

But at the International Rice Research Institute, greenhouses have peeling paint and holes in their screens and walls. Hallways are dotted with empty offices. In the 1980s, the institute employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Now it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.

"We've had an exodus here," said Yvette Naredo, an assistant geneticist.

Similar troubles plague other centers in Asia, Africa and Latin America that work on crop productivity in poor countries. Agricultural experts have complained about the flagging efforts for years and warned of the risks.

"Nobody was listening," said Thomas Lumpkin, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President George W. Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was "like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people."

The Agency for International Development is the primary vehicle for the U.S. government to finance development projects abroad. James Kunder, its acting deputy administrator, said the agency hoped to reconsider the cutbacks if Congress allows extra money.

Crop by crop and country by country, agricultural research and development are lagging.

The biggest cutbacks have come in donations to agriculture in poor countries from the governments of wealthy countries and in loans from development institutions that the wealthy governments control, like the World Bank. Such projects include not only research on pests and crops but also programs to help farmers adopt improved methods in their fields.

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations by more than half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion.

"Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is," said Jan Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University who works with rice.

"It's as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival."

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