Community-Supported Agriculture
Hi Karim,
A Community Supported Agriculture program, or CSA, is an innovative method for linking farmers directly with consumers. That sounds nice, but what can CSAs do for you?
Find out all about what CSAs are, their benefits and flaws, and what they can do for you and your community, here.
https://foodrevolution.org/blog/what-is ... ant-1-of-2
SUMMARY
The pandemic has revealed deep flaws in our industrial food supply chain, leading many people to take an expanded interest in local farms. One of the most popular and fastest-growing models of farm-community commerce is the Community Supported Agriculture program, or CSA. In this article, you’ll find all about what CSAs are, their benefits and flaws, and how you might want to use this innovative model in your life.
Yours for healthy and sustainable food,
WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
Ensuring food security and improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers
Ensuring tangible food security, agricultural development and sustainable resource management has been at the centre of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF)'s activities since it began. Agriculture remains the single largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for 40 percent of today's global population. The world's 500 million small farms worldwide provide up to 80 percent of the food consumed.
However, 800 million people worldwide still lack regular access to adequate amounts of food. Adding to the traditional challenges is a changing climate that is impacting many farmers. Increasing global carbon emissions are affecting the yield and nutritional value of foods grown. Declining Himalayan snow and ice cover, expected to decline 20 percent by 2030, is impeding traditional means of irrigation.
AKF aims to enhance food security, increase sustainable utilisation of natural resources, improve livelihoods from agriculture and improve resilience towards climate change. Of particular importance is the role of women; it is estimated that the elimination of the gender gap would lower the number of undernourished people in the world by 150 million.
Gallery at:
https://www.akdn.org/gallery/ensuring-f ... er-farmers
Ensuring tangible food security, agricultural development and sustainable resource management has been at the centre of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF)'s activities since it began. Agriculture remains the single largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for 40 percent of today's global population. The world's 500 million small farms worldwide provide up to 80 percent of the food consumed.
However, 800 million people worldwide still lack regular access to adequate amounts of food. Adding to the traditional challenges is a changing climate that is impacting many farmers. Increasing global carbon emissions are affecting the yield and nutritional value of foods grown. Declining Himalayan snow and ice cover, expected to decline 20 percent by 2030, is impeding traditional means of irrigation.
AKF aims to enhance food security, increase sustainable utilisation of natural resources, improve livelihoods from agriculture and improve resilience towards climate change. Of particular importance is the role of women; it is estimated that the elimination of the gender gap would lower the number of undernourished people in the world by 150 million.
Gallery at:
https://www.akdn.org/gallery/ensuring-f ... er-farmers
Brazil Is Famous for Its Meat. But Vegetarianism Is Soaring.
The number of vegetarians in Brazil doubled over a six-year period, which has given rise to a booming plant-based industry that is seeking to turn meatpacking plants obsolete.
RIO DE JANEIRO — After years of whipping up large vegan meals for an ashram in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, Luiza de Marilac Tavares found her life upended, and herself out of a job, when the pandemic forced the center to shut down.
She started cooking from home, hoping to make ends meet by taking orders from people she knew. Instead, orders for her exquisite fare soared: With a little Instagram marketing, she had inadvertently tapped into Brazil’s booming demand for plant-based food.
The country, which is the world’s largest beef exporter, has seen a dramatic shift toward plant-based diets. The number of self-declared vegetarians in Brazil has nearly doubled over a six-year period, according to a poll by the research firm Ibope; 30 million people, or 14 percent of Brazilians, reported being vegetarian or vegan in 2018.
Ms. Tavares, a Hare Krishna who describes cooking as a sacred act that brings her closer to God, says, “There is a shift of consciousness underway.”
But the surge in demand extends well beyond the namaste set.
Mainstream supermarkets now stock foods made from plant-based protein next to its meat, poultry and fish. And in the toniest neighborhoods of major capitals, eateries that devote as much attention to atmosphere as they do to the menu serve up inventive, meatless dishes to a casually hip crowd.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The number of vegetarians in Brazil doubled over a six-year period, which has given rise to a booming plant-based industry that is seeking to turn meatpacking plants obsolete.
RIO DE JANEIRO — After years of whipping up large vegan meals for an ashram in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, Luiza de Marilac Tavares found her life upended, and herself out of a job, when the pandemic forced the center to shut down.
She started cooking from home, hoping to make ends meet by taking orders from people she knew. Instead, orders for her exquisite fare soared: With a little Instagram marketing, she had inadvertently tapped into Brazil’s booming demand for plant-based food.
The country, which is the world’s largest beef exporter, has seen a dramatic shift toward plant-based diets. The number of self-declared vegetarians in Brazil has nearly doubled over a six-year period, according to a poll by the research firm Ibope; 30 million people, or 14 percent of Brazilians, reported being vegetarian or vegan in 2018.
Ms. Tavares, a Hare Krishna who describes cooking as a sacred act that brings her closer to God, says, “There is a shift of consciousness underway.”
But the surge in demand extends well beyond the namaste set.
Mainstream supermarkets now stock foods made from plant-based protein next to its meat, poultry and fish. And in the toniest neighborhoods of major capitals, eateries that devote as much attention to atmosphere as they do to the menu serve up inventive, meatless dishes to a casually hip crowd.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Is the Burger Nearing Extinction?
Meat has more competition — and less justification — than ever before.
I liked my patties thin and then I liked them thick. There was the Cheddar period, followed by the Roquefort interregnum. Sesame-seed buns gave way to English muffins as ketchup traded places with special sauce or even, God help me, guacamole, which really was overkill.
But no matter its cradle or condiment, the hamburger was with me for the long haul — I was sure of that.
Until now.
A few days ago I tripped across news that McDonald’s was testing a vegetable-based patty, coming soon to a griddle near you. The McPlant burger, they’re calling it — a McOxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. And McDonald’s is late to the game. Burger King has been selling a meatless Impossible Whopper since 2019. Dunkin’ has been serving a Beyond Sausage Breakfast Sandwich for nearly as long.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates has been telling anyone who will sit still long enough to listen about his investment in a “pretty amazing” start-up that uses a protean protein made from an especially hardy fungus for meatless patties, meatless balls and vegan versions of various dairy products. Over the past weeks, he has plugged it on my Times colleague Kara Swisher’s “Sway” podcast and in Rolling Stone.
On “60 Minutes” he ate yogurt made by the start-up, Nature’s Fynd, with Anderson Cooper, who raved, “Oh, this is good.”
This is the future: not a meatless one — not anytime soon — but one with less meat. I’m now sure of that. It’s the inevitable consequence of alarm over climate change, to which livestock farming contributes significantly. (Gates’s meatless musings were in the context of his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”)
It’s the moral of the McPlant. It’s also the takeaway from Nature’s Fynd, whose story is not just a parable of innovation and imagination but also a glimpse into the ever more muscular push for alternative protein sources and the fleetly growing market for them.
In the relatively brief span of time since Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat introduced their now-ubiquitous burger alternatives, a meatless gold rush was born. “Private investment, public investment, researchers working in this space, start-up companies, announcements from established meat companies launching alternative protein initiatives: All of these were essentially flat until about four or five years ago,” said Liz Specht, the director of science and technology for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. “And then we saw a classic hockey-stick up-swerve.”
The swerve is happening along three main tracks, united by their elimination of the killing of livestock — and of livestock’s big carbon footprint — from the culinary equation.
One track, represented by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, focuses on the refinement of plant-based products that get better and better at providing the pleasures of meat. Agriculture and its strains on Mother Earth remain central.
That’s not so with the track of what Specht calls “cultivated meats,” or meat essentially grown from the stem cells of animals. For now, though, this is an expensive and uncertain proposition.
Nature’s Fynd, which has attracted almost $160 million in funding, belongs to the third track: fermentation-derived proteins made from microorganisms, like fungi, that can be coaxed in a meaty, cheesy, creamy or milky direction. This track is arguably the most exciting — in terms of affordability, versatility, environmental gentleness and untapped possibility. There are microbes out there just waiting to feed us.
The one that Nature’s Fynd turned into its trademark protein, which it calls Fy, came from Yellowstone National Park of all places. Did you know that the park is a geological and ecological outlier, an extreme environment that’s home to herculean organisms whose ability to survive there suggests a potency deployable in any number of ways? Me neither.
But Mark Kozubal, a Montana scientist and outdoorsman, was up to speed and, more than a decade ago, was investigating the park’s hot springs and other waters for an “extremophile” that might be a useful biofuel. He came across an unclassified fungus that instead had culinary potential.
It has since been named Fusarium strain flavolapis. (Flavo lapis is Latin for yellow stone.) Nature’s Fynd got commercial rights to it from the federal government through a benefits-sharing agreement; the company supports continued research for the park. Kozubal is now the chief science officer for the company.
When the fungus is grown via a fermentation process patented by Nature’s Fynd, it produces rectangular slabs of Fy that look sort of like thick, gargantuan lasagna noodles. Fy can then be pulverized and watered down for soft or liquid foods, or it can be sculpted into nuggets, patties, balls and more.
“It’s got the texture that we want and the protein content that we want, but it’s a blank canvas that we can then give to food scientists and chefs to build into the products,” Kozubal told me. And it’s produced on racks of stacked trays — in a warehouse in the Chicago meatpacking district, as it happens — using much less space and water than traditional agriculture demands.
Last month, Nature’s Fynd unveiled a direct-order breakfast combo of faux-sausage patties and a mock cream cheese for $14.99 and quickly sold out. It’s restocking and expects to have those products plus others — maybe the yogurt, maybe meatballs — on store shelves later this year. If all goes well, it will expand from there. A burger can’t be too far off.
“There’s tremendous potential here,” Specht told me, referring to fermentation-derived proteins. She added that while they’ve been around awhile — a British company, Quorn, has been making them for decades — they seem to be taking off only now. For example, the companies Meati Foods, Mycorena and Prime Roots are all developing or selling products along these lines.
But given the long love affair that many humans, including this one, have had with animal meat, is there really a chance that these substitutes can make all that much headway in the near future? Thomas Jonas, the chief executive of Nature’s Fynd, said that a conspicuous change in America’s beverage-scape suggests so.
“Ten or 15 years ago, if you were looking at soy milk or almond milk, you were looking at something that was considered to be for health stores and tree-huggers and hippies, right?” he said. Now, both take up considerable space in every supermarket I visit, and there’s nary a coffee shop without one or the other. Nobody, Jonas argued, would have predicted that.
Also, he said, there’s a discernible awakening of people’s consciousness of the degradation of the environment, our contribution to that and the impact of individual behavior on communal health.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Meat has more competition — and less justification — than ever before.
I liked my patties thin and then I liked them thick. There was the Cheddar period, followed by the Roquefort interregnum. Sesame-seed buns gave way to English muffins as ketchup traded places with special sauce or even, God help me, guacamole, which really was overkill.
But no matter its cradle or condiment, the hamburger was with me for the long haul — I was sure of that.
Until now.
A few days ago I tripped across news that McDonald’s was testing a vegetable-based patty, coming soon to a griddle near you. The McPlant burger, they’re calling it — a McOxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. And McDonald’s is late to the game. Burger King has been selling a meatless Impossible Whopper since 2019. Dunkin’ has been serving a Beyond Sausage Breakfast Sandwich for nearly as long.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates has been telling anyone who will sit still long enough to listen about his investment in a “pretty amazing” start-up that uses a protean protein made from an especially hardy fungus for meatless patties, meatless balls and vegan versions of various dairy products. Over the past weeks, he has plugged it on my Times colleague Kara Swisher’s “Sway” podcast and in Rolling Stone.
On “60 Minutes” he ate yogurt made by the start-up, Nature’s Fynd, with Anderson Cooper, who raved, “Oh, this is good.”
This is the future: not a meatless one — not anytime soon — but one with less meat. I’m now sure of that. It’s the inevitable consequence of alarm over climate change, to which livestock farming contributes significantly. (Gates’s meatless musings were in the context of his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”)
It’s the moral of the McPlant. It’s also the takeaway from Nature’s Fynd, whose story is not just a parable of innovation and imagination but also a glimpse into the ever more muscular push for alternative protein sources and the fleetly growing market for them.
In the relatively brief span of time since Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat introduced their now-ubiquitous burger alternatives, a meatless gold rush was born. “Private investment, public investment, researchers working in this space, start-up companies, announcements from established meat companies launching alternative protein initiatives: All of these were essentially flat until about four or five years ago,” said Liz Specht, the director of science and technology for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. “And then we saw a classic hockey-stick up-swerve.”
The swerve is happening along three main tracks, united by their elimination of the killing of livestock — and of livestock’s big carbon footprint — from the culinary equation.
One track, represented by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, focuses on the refinement of plant-based products that get better and better at providing the pleasures of meat. Agriculture and its strains on Mother Earth remain central.
That’s not so with the track of what Specht calls “cultivated meats,” or meat essentially grown from the stem cells of animals. For now, though, this is an expensive and uncertain proposition.
Nature’s Fynd, which has attracted almost $160 million in funding, belongs to the third track: fermentation-derived proteins made from microorganisms, like fungi, that can be coaxed in a meaty, cheesy, creamy or milky direction. This track is arguably the most exciting — in terms of affordability, versatility, environmental gentleness and untapped possibility. There are microbes out there just waiting to feed us.
The one that Nature’s Fynd turned into its trademark protein, which it calls Fy, came from Yellowstone National Park of all places. Did you know that the park is a geological and ecological outlier, an extreme environment that’s home to herculean organisms whose ability to survive there suggests a potency deployable in any number of ways? Me neither.
But Mark Kozubal, a Montana scientist and outdoorsman, was up to speed and, more than a decade ago, was investigating the park’s hot springs and other waters for an “extremophile” that might be a useful biofuel. He came across an unclassified fungus that instead had culinary potential.
It has since been named Fusarium strain flavolapis. (Flavo lapis is Latin for yellow stone.) Nature’s Fynd got commercial rights to it from the federal government through a benefits-sharing agreement; the company supports continued research for the park. Kozubal is now the chief science officer for the company.
When the fungus is grown via a fermentation process patented by Nature’s Fynd, it produces rectangular slabs of Fy that look sort of like thick, gargantuan lasagna noodles. Fy can then be pulverized and watered down for soft or liquid foods, or it can be sculpted into nuggets, patties, balls and more.
“It’s got the texture that we want and the protein content that we want, but it’s a blank canvas that we can then give to food scientists and chefs to build into the products,” Kozubal told me. And it’s produced on racks of stacked trays — in a warehouse in the Chicago meatpacking district, as it happens — using much less space and water than traditional agriculture demands.
Last month, Nature’s Fynd unveiled a direct-order breakfast combo of faux-sausage patties and a mock cream cheese for $14.99 and quickly sold out. It’s restocking and expects to have those products plus others — maybe the yogurt, maybe meatballs — on store shelves later this year. If all goes well, it will expand from there. A burger can’t be too far off.
“There’s tremendous potential here,” Specht told me, referring to fermentation-derived proteins. She added that while they’ve been around awhile — a British company, Quorn, has been making them for decades — they seem to be taking off only now. For example, the companies Meati Foods, Mycorena and Prime Roots are all developing or selling products along these lines.
But given the long love affair that many humans, including this one, have had with animal meat, is there really a chance that these substitutes can make all that much headway in the near future? Thomas Jonas, the chief executive of Nature’s Fynd, said that a conspicuous change in America’s beverage-scape suggests so.
“Ten or 15 years ago, if you were looking at soy milk or almond milk, you were looking at something that was considered to be for health stores and tree-huggers and hippies, right?” he said. Now, both take up considerable space in every supermarket I visit, and there’s nary a coffee shop without one or the other. Nobody, Jonas argued, would have predicted that.
Also, he said, there’s a discernible awakening of people’s consciousness of the degradation of the environment, our contribution to that and the impact of individual behavior on communal health.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Event
Water Management Under Extreme Conditions
Hosted by
AKU ISMC and AKAH
Water Management Under Extreme Conditions
A Panel Discussion by AKU ISMC and AKAH
24 March 2021 12:00 - 14:00 London time
Online
AKAH has provided safe drinking water supply systems to nearly 500,000 people in Northern Pakistan. Photo Credit AKAH Pakistan
The panel will discuss some of the challenges and lessons learned managing water supply and resources in extreme environments amongst some of the world’s highest mountains in Pakistan and arid, drought-prone fragile regions of Syria. Nawab Ali Khan, CEO of AKAH Pakistan, will talk about the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat’s experience over the past 25 years providing safely-managed, sustainable water supply systems to communities in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral. AKAH is now working to expand the success of this rural, community-managed model to urban and peri-urban areas. Dr. Jeff Tan, Associate Professor at AKU ISMC, will share the first findings of joint research looking at the viability and potential to scale up this model in urban settings. Dr. Oula Shahin, Professor at Damascus University, will talk about the water crisis in Salamieh, Syria and her work with AKAH implementing an integrated water resource initiative, modelling groundwater systems and promoting community-led sustainable management practices. Surekha Ghogale, CEO of AKAH Syria will moderate the panel.
The Joint Lecture Series is a joint initiative of AKU-ISMC and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture's Education Programme; the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the Aga Khan Museum are also organizing partners this year.
The event is online. Please register here https://iis-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regis ... NDhyBdXNaa
Water Management Under Extreme Conditions
Hosted by
AKU ISMC and AKAH
Water Management Under Extreme Conditions
A Panel Discussion by AKU ISMC and AKAH
24 March 2021 12:00 - 14:00 London time
Online
AKAH has provided safe drinking water supply systems to nearly 500,000 people in Northern Pakistan. Photo Credit AKAH Pakistan
The panel will discuss some of the challenges and lessons learned managing water supply and resources in extreme environments amongst some of the world’s highest mountains in Pakistan and arid, drought-prone fragile regions of Syria. Nawab Ali Khan, CEO of AKAH Pakistan, will talk about the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat’s experience over the past 25 years providing safely-managed, sustainable water supply systems to communities in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral. AKAH is now working to expand the success of this rural, community-managed model to urban and peri-urban areas. Dr. Jeff Tan, Associate Professor at AKU ISMC, will share the first findings of joint research looking at the viability and potential to scale up this model in urban settings. Dr. Oula Shahin, Professor at Damascus University, will talk about the water crisis in Salamieh, Syria and her work with AKAH implementing an integrated water resource initiative, modelling groundwater systems and promoting community-led sustainable management practices. Surekha Ghogale, CEO of AKAH Syria will moderate the panel.
The Joint Lecture Series is a joint initiative of AKU-ISMC and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture's Education Programme; the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the Aga Khan Museum are also organizing partners this year.
The event is online. Please register here https://iis-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regis ... NDhyBdXNaa
Water and Global Health Complexities and Challenges: Webinar hosted by AKU
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN7KuJydRzk
There has been significant progress in access to safe water and to a lesser extent adequate sanitation worldwide, but major scientific and social challenges remain. On 17 February 2021, the Aga Khan University Institute for Global Health and Development hosted a webinar involving a presentation and discussion on water and health in the context of climate change, issues of place, conflict and culture in water-related disease and the interplay of water, health, gender and wellbeing in the built environment. Today, AKDN is releasing the webinar on its channels to help bring attention to World Water Day.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN7KuJydRzk
There has been significant progress in access to safe water and to a lesser extent adequate sanitation worldwide, but major scientific and social challenges remain. On 17 February 2021, the Aga Khan University Institute for Global Health and Development hosted a webinar involving a presentation and discussion on water and health in the context of climate change, issues of place, conflict and culture in water-related disease and the interplay of water, health, gender and wellbeing in the built environment. Today, AKDN is releasing the webinar on its channels to help bring attention to World Water Day.
World Water Day serves a stark reminder on Thar's thirst
Waterborne diseases from consumption of brackish water are a common phenomenon in Achhro Thar.
Mohammad Hussain Khan Updated about 11 hours ago
Held every year on March 22 since 1993, World Water Day celebrates water and raises awareness of the 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water across the globe.
The theme of this year's celebration is “valuing water”.
And in Pakistan, who can “value” water more than an ordinary inhabitant of Thar?
Many in Achhro Thar, which literally translates to the white desert, are unaware about the significance of the day. For dwellers like Jeo Hingorjo — a resident of the Hathungo part of Achhro Thar — taking care of livestock trumps all else.
And rightly so. That's because their survival depends on livestock rearing. Sweet water is just a luxury for them.
Herds of goats and camels graze the lands freely in all directions of the desert. Huts or chauhnras — made of thatched straw — dot the landscape and complement the white desert's serene beauty.
Huts made of thatched straw dot the desert’s landscape in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
A camel and donkey wander alone, unattended to in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Traversing through sand dunes and large tracts of the unending desert in a modern 4x4 vehicle like we did is no less a joy ride compared to the locals’ routine mode of travel: overcrowded jeeps whose engines break down often.
These jeeps are used by residents to reach the barrage areas for different chores.
A much more recent phenomenon, jeeps are now commonly used to transport locals and their livestock. Before them, the rickety kekras — old US Army trucks — were the most common mode of transport for humans, livestock and goods alike. Now, these trucks are used mostly to transport goods.
Facing India’s Rajasthan desert in the east and spread around 4,800 square kilometres, Achhro Thar stretches from Khairpur and Ghotki, both districts on the left bank of the Indus, in upper Sindh, to Khipro and Sanghar talukas of Sanghar district in lower Sindh.
Sanghar is a barrage area and a highly rated cotton-producing district; though cotton production has now been facing a countrywide decline for the last several years.
Achhro Thar is named so because of the colour of its soil that makes it distinctive from other parts of Thar. The white desert has large swathes of clean sand dunes, known in local parlance as draih. According to the Sindh irrigation department’s estimates, the area has 95 per cent brackish subsoil water.
Water is transferred to a storage tank in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“But it [Achhro Thar’s soil] is not culturable or fertile. Only small pockets of land have potential for crop cultivation after monsoon rains, like any other parts of the desert district of Mithi,” says Nawaz Kumbhar, who often writes on the area’s issues.
Fetching water at a distance of several kilometres is not unusual. Not to mention, it requires serious effort to lift water from a well which can be somewhere between 24.3 metres to 61 metres deep. I watched as three to four people, including women and young girls, collected water from one such well.
But waterborne diseases from consumption of brackish water are a common phenomenon here.
Symptoms of Fluorosis – a cosmetic condition that affects the teeth and is caused by overexposure to fluoride during the first eight years of life – were evident on the teeth of unkempt Thari children and adults with poverty writ large on their faces.
Women and children fetch water from a well in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“We need a long rope and a bucket and obviously a pair of donkeys or one camel to bring water to our home from the well," says Jeo. “Pulling the rope from a well is not an easy job. It requires strength. So our camels or donkeys make this task achievable,” he says.
Jeo lives in the village of Asodar, with an estimated 100 households and population of 700 people, in the Khipro taluka.
The total dissolved solids in well water here are as high as 1,800 parts per million (ppm) versus safe limits of 1,000 ppm as per National Environmental Quality Standards and 500ppm recommended by the World Health Organisation.
“Taste-wise water looks good but it has started causing pain in [my] back and joints of [the] body,” says Jeo, adding that a number of residents have become bed-ridden or physically incapacitated.
Since soil in Achhro Thar doesn’t suit crop cultivation, the economic cycle of residents revolves around livestock — their bread and butter.
A child walks on barren and arid land in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Locals cherish their livestock because it rescues them from hardship and ensures their survival when drought sets in. “We sell a few goats to bring ration for [the] household,” quips Ameer Bux Higorjo as he joins the conversation.
“Since our goats are weak, they don’t get a better price [in the] piri (cattle bazaar). I sell a goat for Rs8,000 or so,” he says.
Sanghar district has the second-highest livestock population as per the Sindh livestock department’s projected 2018 figures – 1.260 million goats, 238,624 sheep and 1.182m cows and buffaloes. Livestock holdings also vary from household to household.
A herd of cattle in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
To quote Khuman Singh Sodho, a social activist and resident of Jinhar, some residents here have 500 goats and others have 200. “So the size of livestock holding is different,” he says.
Travelling longer distances for treatment of medical ailments, more often than not a result of consuming brackish water, puts additional financial burden on residents. Having to go to Khipro city for even the most common illnesses doesn’t worry them as much as the Rs200 fare. And in cases of emergency, it costs more.
“We pay Rs4,000 to Rs5,000 to shift an expecting mother to a health facility located either in Khipro or near our border,” says Jeo.
Sodho believes the government needs to encourage people here to cultivate crops after some experiments. “Unless people shift to agriculture in areas where potential for crop cultivation exists, things won’t change. We will keep suffering. People are not willing to leave their abodes,” he says in a confident tone.
Ray of hope
But it seems all is not lost.
People in another area of Achhro Thar are somewhat lucky. Lately, they have been provided with the Indus river’s sweet water through a multi-billion rupee project thanks to the efforts of Shazia Marri, a young and energetic lower house member from Sanghar.
Marri won a directly contested seat from Sanghar, first in 2013 and then in 2018, to dent the stronghold of Pir Pagara whose political party, Pakistan Muslim League – Functional, had been ruling the roost until 2008. The PML-F did not bring any proposal to solve the area’s water woes.
Marri, PPP’s central information secretary, worked on a water supply project for Achhro Thar, which falls in her constituency, in collaboration with the Sindh irrigation department. It started in 2015 and was completed in 2018 when PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari inaugurated it on March 31, 2018.
A reservoir of water for a water supply project in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
These water supply schemes cater to the need of a population of approximately 30,000 humans and 25,000 livestock in 101 villages. The project, with a 5.85 million gallon storage in two settlements tanks and ponds, is connected to a solar-powered energy system in Jamalabad.
Water is then supplied to villages through underground tanks. If not wonders, the scheme has certainly brought a great degree of change in the lives of the population, lessening expenditures incurred on health with villagers no longer needing to travel to far-off places to fetch water.
A reservoir of water for a water supply project in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“We don’t need to travel to far-off areas from our village like five to six kilometers. We get canal water in or near our villages,” says Rahim of Kak village, dominated by the Rajar community.
“We and our livestock drink the same water through underground storage,” he says.
Women fetching water in Chhachhro taluka, Mithi, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Rahim and other villagers agree that their health is changing as they no longer depend on subsoil groundwater that was the only source of water for them since the country's inception.
Children drinking water from a well in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Nara Canal, one of the seven main and lengthiest canals of Sukkur Barrage, is the main source of water supply for this scheme. Water is stored at zero point in Jamalabad area, according to irrigation officer Mansoor Memon, who was part of project’s execution.
Villagers living in the right and left catchments of storage tanks get water through pipelines. Air valves are also established at smaller distances to drop water from the valve which is then consumed by herds of goat, sheep, camel, and cattle.
Perhaps, other parts of Achhro Thar can also be connected with piped water supply through the same Nara Canal after its realignment is completed, conditional on the irrigation department getting the government’s nod.
Till then, residents of the white desert will continue to suffer from polluted water in harsh weather conditions, aggravated further by climate change.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1613974/world ... ars-thirst
Waterborne diseases from consumption of brackish water are a common phenomenon in Achhro Thar.
Mohammad Hussain Khan Updated about 11 hours ago
Held every year on March 22 since 1993, World Water Day celebrates water and raises awareness of the 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water across the globe.
The theme of this year's celebration is “valuing water”.
And in Pakistan, who can “value” water more than an ordinary inhabitant of Thar?
Many in Achhro Thar, which literally translates to the white desert, are unaware about the significance of the day. For dwellers like Jeo Hingorjo — a resident of the Hathungo part of Achhro Thar — taking care of livestock trumps all else.
And rightly so. That's because their survival depends on livestock rearing. Sweet water is just a luxury for them.
Herds of goats and camels graze the lands freely in all directions of the desert. Huts or chauhnras — made of thatched straw — dot the landscape and complement the white desert's serene beauty.
Huts made of thatched straw dot the desert’s landscape in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
A camel and donkey wander alone, unattended to in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Traversing through sand dunes and large tracts of the unending desert in a modern 4x4 vehicle like we did is no less a joy ride compared to the locals’ routine mode of travel: overcrowded jeeps whose engines break down often.
These jeeps are used by residents to reach the barrage areas for different chores.
A much more recent phenomenon, jeeps are now commonly used to transport locals and their livestock. Before them, the rickety kekras — old US Army trucks — were the most common mode of transport for humans, livestock and goods alike. Now, these trucks are used mostly to transport goods.
Facing India’s Rajasthan desert in the east and spread around 4,800 square kilometres, Achhro Thar stretches from Khairpur and Ghotki, both districts on the left bank of the Indus, in upper Sindh, to Khipro and Sanghar talukas of Sanghar district in lower Sindh.
Sanghar is a barrage area and a highly rated cotton-producing district; though cotton production has now been facing a countrywide decline for the last several years.
Achhro Thar is named so because of the colour of its soil that makes it distinctive from other parts of Thar. The white desert has large swathes of clean sand dunes, known in local parlance as draih. According to the Sindh irrigation department’s estimates, the area has 95 per cent brackish subsoil water.
Water is transferred to a storage tank in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“But it [Achhro Thar’s soil] is not culturable or fertile. Only small pockets of land have potential for crop cultivation after monsoon rains, like any other parts of the desert district of Mithi,” says Nawaz Kumbhar, who often writes on the area’s issues.
Fetching water at a distance of several kilometres is not unusual. Not to mention, it requires serious effort to lift water from a well which can be somewhere between 24.3 metres to 61 metres deep. I watched as three to four people, including women and young girls, collected water from one such well.
But waterborne diseases from consumption of brackish water are a common phenomenon here.
Symptoms of Fluorosis – a cosmetic condition that affects the teeth and is caused by overexposure to fluoride during the first eight years of life – were evident on the teeth of unkempt Thari children and adults with poverty writ large on their faces.
Women and children fetch water from a well in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“We need a long rope and a bucket and obviously a pair of donkeys or one camel to bring water to our home from the well," says Jeo. “Pulling the rope from a well is not an easy job. It requires strength. So our camels or donkeys make this task achievable,” he says.
Jeo lives in the village of Asodar, with an estimated 100 households and population of 700 people, in the Khipro taluka.
The total dissolved solids in well water here are as high as 1,800 parts per million (ppm) versus safe limits of 1,000 ppm as per National Environmental Quality Standards and 500ppm recommended by the World Health Organisation.
“Taste-wise water looks good but it has started causing pain in [my] back and joints of [the] body,” says Jeo, adding that a number of residents have become bed-ridden or physically incapacitated.
Since soil in Achhro Thar doesn’t suit crop cultivation, the economic cycle of residents revolves around livestock — their bread and butter.
A child walks on barren and arid land in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Locals cherish their livestock because it rescues them from hardship and ensures their survival when drought sets in. “We sell a few goats to bring ration for [the] household,” quips Ameer Bux Higorjo as he joins the conversation.
“Since our goats are weak, they don’t get a better price [in the] piri (cattle bazaar). I sell a goat for Rs8,000 or so,” he says.
Sanghar district has the second-highest livestock population as per the Sindh livestock department’s projected 2018 figures – 1.260 million goats, 238,624 sheep and 1.182m cows and buffaloes. Livestock holdings also vary from household to household.
A herd of cattle in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
To quote Khuman Singh Sodho, a social activist and resident of Jinhar, some residents here have 500 goats and others have 200. “So the size of livestock holding is different,” he says.
Travelling longer distances for treatment of medical ailments, more often than not a result of consuming brackish water, puts additional financial burden on residents. Having to go to Khipro city for even the most common illnesses doesn’t worry them as much as the Rs200 fare. And in cases of emergency, it costs more.
“We pay Rs4,000 to Rs5,000 to shift an expecting mother to a health facility located either in Khipro or near our border,” says Jeo.
Sodho believes the government needs to encourage people here to cultivate crops after some experiments. “Unless people shift to agriculture in areas where potential for crop cultivation exists, things won’t change. We will keep suffering. People are not willing to leave their abodes,” he says in a confident tone.
Ray of hope
But it seems all is not lost.
People in another area of Achhro Thar are somewhat lucky. Lately, they have been provided with the Indus river’s sweet water through a multi-billion rupee project thanks to the efforts of Shazia Marri, a young and energetic lower house member from Sanghar.
Marri won a directly contested seat from Sanghar, first in 2013 and then in 2018, to dent the stronghold of Pir Pagara whose political party, Pakistan Muslim League – Functional, had been ruling the roost until 2008. The PML-F did not bring any proposal to solve the area’s water woes.
Marri, PPP’s central information secretary, worked on a water supply project for Achhro Thar, which falls in her constituency, in collaboration with the Sindh irrigation department. It started in 2015 and was completed in 2018 when PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari inaugurated it on March 31, 2018.
A reservoir of water for a water supply project in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
These water supply schemes cater to the need of a population of approximately 30,000 humans and 25,000 livestock in 101 villages. The project, with a 5.85 million gallon storage in two settlements tanks and ponds, is connected to a solar-powered energy system in Jamalabad.
Water is then supplied to villages through underground tanks. If not wonders, the scheme has certainly brought a great degree of change in the lives of the population, lessening expenditures incurred on health with villagers no longer needing to travel to far-off places to fetch water.
A reservoir of water for a water supply project in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
“We don’t need to travel to far-off areas from our village like five to six kilometers. We get canal water in or near our villages,” says Rahim of Kak village, dominated by the Rajar community.
“We and our livestock drink the same water through underground storage,” he says.
Women fetching water in Chhachhro taluka, Mithi, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Rahim and other villagers agree that their health is changing as they no longer depend on subsoil groundwater that was the only source of water for them since the country's inception.
Children drinking water from a well in Achhro Thar, Khipro, Sindh. — Photo by Umair Ali
Nara Canal, one of the seven main and lengthiest canals of Sukkur Barrage, is the main source of water supply for this scheme. Water is stored at zero point in Jamalabad area, according to irrigation officer Mansoor Memon, who was part of project’s execution.
Villagers living in the right and left catchments of storage tanks get water through pipelines. Air valves are also established at smaller distances to drop water from the valve which is then consumed by herds of goat, sheep, camel, and cattle.
Perhaps, other parts of Achhro Thar can also be connected with piped water supply through the same Nara Canal after its realignment is completed, conditional on the irrigation department getting the government’s nod.
Till then, residents of the white desert will continue to suffer from polluted water in harsh weather conditions, aggravated further by climate change.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1613974/world ... ars-thirst
‘People need help now, they can’t wait’ – Land, Water and Borders along the Silk Road
In 2019, AKF's Nick McGrath travelled to the Uzbek-Tajik-Kyrgyz border regions to find out how AKDN is working to help ease tensions over resources
The sudden and dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the emergence of the independent states of Central Asia. For a landlocked and historically interconnected region, the formalising and hardening of new national borders – once open and porous – has had a huge impact on regional cooperation and stability.
Localised, border conflicts over the control of resources, particularly around irrigation water and grazing lands, are increasingly affecting local, regional, and international relations.
With much of the world rediscovering this forgotten region due to the colossal ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ being implemented by the Chinese government, I travelled to the troubled border regions of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to find out more about how the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) and its partners are working with border communities to address complex challenges facing people living in the borderlands of the former Silk Road.
Criss-cross border, divided communities
The Soviet era saw massive industrialisation and investment in infrastructure and public services in Central Asia, but left a complex legacy of ethnic tension and environmental problems.
Tortuous, centrally planned borders criss-cross the region, often leaving Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik communities on different sides of increasingly harder borders, but reliant on the same shared natural resources of land and water.
As the head of the district water department in Ferghana on the Kyrgyz side of the Kyrgyz–Uzbek border explains:
“A significant part of the population here are Uzbeks. The rest are Kyrgyz. We grew up together. We are the same people. Lots of people have family relations across the border. My sister married an Uzbek and lives in Uzbekistan.”
Water for irrigating the primary crop in the region, wheat, and land for grazing livestock are under intense pressure, but sources have been partitioned across hard borders. He continued:
“During the Soviet era people were collectivised and water was piped directly to collective farms. When the Soviet system ended, governance of water collapsed. Families were taking water as they wanted. Irrigation canals were badly damaged.”
In the ensuing collapse, government budgets disappeared overnight, and transition from a state centric model of free services to a market economy saw the establishment of community-run Water User Associations (WUA), to relieve pressure on local government. As a local WUA member in Osh district explained:
“The local government couldn’t afford to manage water anymore. In the past water was free. But slowly fees were introduced. There was a lot of resistance. People said ‘why should we pay for water from God?’ We had to establish a conflict mitigation committee to deal with disputes in the community over access to water.”
More...
https://www.akf.org.uk/people-need-help ... 25c8c5fc8d
In 2019, AKF's Nick McGrath travelled to the Uzbek-Tajik-Kyrgyz border regions to find out how AKDN is working to help ease tensions over resources
The sudden and dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the emergence of the independent states of Central Asia. For a landlocked and historically interconnected region, the formalising and hardening of new national borders – once open and porous – has had a huge impact on regional cooperation and stability.
Localised, border conflicts over the control of resources, particularly around irrigation water and grazing lands, are increasingly affecting local, regional, and international relations.
With much of the world rediscovering this forgotten region due to the colossal ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ being implemented by the Chinese government, I travelled to the troubled border regions of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to find out more about how the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) and its partners are working with border communities to address complex challenges facing people living in the borderlands of the former Silk Road.
Criss-cross border, divided communities
The Soviet era saw massive industrialisation and investment in infrastructure and public services in Central Asia, but left a complex legacy of ethnic tension and environmental problems.
Tortuous, centrally planned borders criss-cross the region, often leaving Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik communities on different sides of increasingly harder borders, but reliant on the same shared natural resources of land and water.
As the head of the district water department in Ferghana on the Kyrgyz side of the Kyrgyz–Uzbek border explains:
“A significant part of the population here are Uzbeks. The rest are Kyrgyz. We grew up together. We are the same people. Lots of people have family relations across the border. My sister married an Uzbek and lives in Uzbekistan.”
Water for irrigating the primary crop in the region, wheat, and land for grazing livestock are under intense pressure, but sources have been partitioned across hard borders. He continued:
“During the Soviet era people were collectivised and water was piped directly to collective farms. When the Soviet system ended, governance of water collapsed. Families were taking water as they wanted. Irrigation canals were badly damaged.”
In the ensuing collapse, government budgets disappeared overnight, and transition from a state centric model of free services to a market economy saw the establishment of community-run Water User Associations (WUA), to relieve pressure on local government. As a local WUA member in Osh district explained:
“The local government couldn’t afford to manage water anymore. In the past water was free. But slowly fees were introduced. There was a lot of resistance. People said ‘why should we pay for water from God?’ We had to establish a conflict mitigation committee to deal with disputes in the community over access to water.”
More...
https://www.akf.org.uk/people-need-help ... 25c8c5fc8d
Hi Karim,
Question: What’s the single largest irrigated crop in the United States?
Answer: Lawns.
In fact — get ready to have your mind blown with this one — right now in the US, 10 million acres of land are used for all fruits and veggies grown in the nation, while 32 million acres are used to grow lawns.
If we converted lawns to gardens, we could free up PLENTY of land to grow abundant fruits and vegetables. And we’d also save water, pesticides, and maintenance time!
Get the whole story along with tips for turning lawns into gardens, here.
https://foodrevolution.org/blog/benefit ... nd-gardens
Yours for growing food and healing the world,
Ocean Robbins
Farms. Food. Future.
Farms. Food. Future. looks at the big issues facing farmers in the developing world and what needs to be done to wipe out global hunger while dealing with the climate crisis. It’s brought to you by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development and presented by Brian Thomson.
Listen to the podcasts at:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f ... 1488616432
Farms. Food. Future. looks at the big issues facing farmers in the developing world and what needs to be done to wipe out global hunger while dealing with the climate crisis. It’s brought to you by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development and presented by Brian Thomson.
Listen to the podcasts at:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f ... 1488616432
Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage
Ian James, Arizona Republic
Sun, June 6, 2021, 2:20 PM
BOULDER CITY, Nevada — Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam.
In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men are shown gripping a boat’s wheel, harvesting an armful of wheat, standing beside cascading water and lifting a heavy weight overhead. With the concrete figures are words that encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER.
Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. But the rules for managing the river and dividing up its water — which were laid down nearly a century ago starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact and which have repeatedly been tweaked — are now facing the greatest strains since the dam was built.
The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are strikingly visible along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes.
Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is now just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled.
One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands, and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks.
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead photographed from the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge on May 10, 2021. A high-water mark or "bathtub ring" is visible on the shoreline.
Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer
Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the U.S. and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce.
Bernardo’s team also sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will likely change over the next 24 months.
Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers.
Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk due to extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow.
“Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.”
And that will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in both Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system.
The warm, dry conditions over the past two years have baked the watershed’s soils to such an extent, Bernardo says, that “when the snowmelt starts to run off, it just gets sucked up into the ground like a sponge.”
But the demands for water downstream from Hoover Dam continue. And with the Southwest’s farmlands in peak irrigation season through June, Bernardo says, Lake Mead’s surface is dropping about 1 foot each week.
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Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, at Hoover Dam in May 2021.
Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, at Hoover Dam in May 2021.
The reservoir has declined more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to fall about 9 feet more by the end of this year.
The latest projections show that by the end of 2021, Lake Mead will decline below an elevation of 1,066 feet, far below the threshold — 1,075 feet — for the federal government to declare a shortage. That’s expected to happen in August, triggering the largest water cuts to date next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
Even larger cutbacks could come in 2023 if the reservoir continues to decline as projected over the next year into a more severe “Tier 2” shortage.
Lake Mead's downward spiral is being driven largely by the dire situation upstream at Lake Powell, which has declined to 34% of full capacity.
“We need three to four consecutive years of above-average inflow, snowpack runoff and inflow into Lake Powell, to refill these reservoirs,” Bernardo says. “So that's what we're hoping for.”
The Colorado River naturally cycles through wet and dry periods. But over the past 22 years, the watershed has had 17 dry years, Bernardo says, and only 5 years with above-average or wet conditions.
With climate change, hotter temperatures have been evaporating more moisture off the landscape and leaving less flowing in the river and its tributaries. Scientists describe it as a “megadrought” and one that, unlike the long droughts of the past, is being amplified by carbon pollution and the heating of the planet.
One of the unknowns facing the officials who manage Colorado River water is just how severely the reservoirs could be affected by climate-driven “aridification” in the years to come. But some scientists have estimated the river could lose roughly one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures continue to rise, and that for each additional 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) of warming, the average flow is likely to drop by about 9%.
“With the warmer temperatures,” Bernardo says, “not only do we see things melt off quicker but you have that rising snow line, which creates less inflow.”
The Overton Arm of Lake Mead at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The reservoir has declined dramatically since 2000.
The Overton Arm of Lake Mead at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The reservoir has declined dramatically since 2000.
The declines in the reservoirs have accelerated over the past two years.
In 2019, representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California agreed under a deal called the Drought Contingency Plan to share in water reductions through 2026 to reduce the risks of Lake Mead falling to critically low levels. The agreement calls for progressively larger cutbacks if Lake Mead continues to drop below lower trigger points in the coming years.
If the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet, California would start to take cuts. And Mexico is already contributing by leaving some water in Lake Mead.
“These mechanisms have been put into place to protect these reservoir elevations,” Bernardo says.
While the latest agreement is intended as a temporary stopgap measure, officials from the seven states that depend on the river are preparing to negotiate new rules for managing shortages after 2026. And those talks promise to be tougher.
In the meantime, Bernardo says, the bureau's responsibilities in managing the dams and water deliveries remain the same. And that includes incorporating the latest science and models, and providing up-to-date information to representatives of the states, water districts, tribes and other entities along the river, Bernardo says, “to communicate what's going on and what we're seeing, so everyone can act proactively.”
“When you have a river system like this, a complex reservoir and river system especially, that is experiencing the hydrology that we've been seeing, and such a quick decline in the Upper Basin over these last two years, transparency and communication is key,” Bernardo says.
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Bernardo is 35 and has worked for the Bureau of Reclamation for nearly a decade, including the last two years as river operations manager. A mechanical engineer who grew up in New Jersey, he usually works with his staff at the agency’s office in Boulder City, Nevada, but he also regularly drives out to visit the dam, sometimes to lead special tours.
Whenever he rounds the curve in the canyon and sees the dam, Bernardo says, he feels awestruck and “the hair still sticks up on my arms.”
“It never gets old,” he says. “I’m wowed by the engineering marvel.”
Part of that comes from knowing the history of all that went into the dam’s design and construction during the Great Depression, from the hand-drawn blueprints to the blasting with dynamite, the railroad that carried supplies, and the massive amounts of concrete that were poured in, creating a dam that is 660 feet thick at its base — nearly as thick between the reservoir and the downstream side as it is tall. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 4-feet wide around the entire Earth at the equator.)
Whenever he visits the dam, Bernardo says, its historical significance is also inescapable: how it controlled the Colorado’s floods, opened up arid lands for farming and fed the rise of cities across the Southwest. As he describes it, the dam “helped nourish our nation” and helped the West thrive.
“We like to show it off,” he says.
With higher lake levels, Hoover Dam's normal capacity is 2,074 megawatts, Bernardo explains, generating enough power per year to supply approximately 450,000 average households. But at today’s lake level, the dam’s capacity has decreased about 25% to 1,567 megawatts, and it’s generating enough power for roughly 350,000 homes.
With every foot the lake declines, about 6 megawatts of power-generating capacity is lost.
The lowest level at which Hoover could produce power is about 950 feet, with an expected capacity of 650 megawatts. If the lake were to fall below that point — a scenario the existing rules are geared toward avoiding — the dam would no longer be able to generate power.
The generator/turbine gallery on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The generator/turbine gallery on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
As the reservoir continues to decline, releasing the same amount of water yields a bigger drop in lake level.
“That's one of the concerning pieces,” Bernardo says. “The reservoir is shaped, we call it a teacup, but more like a martini glass. And the lower the elevation goes, the faster the rate of decline.”
That dynamic also affects how much the planned water cuts can help Mead’s level. Under a first-tier shortage next year, for example, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico are preparing for cuts totaling 613,000 acre-feet, which Bernardo says is equivalent to 7-8 feet of elevation in Lake Mead.
If the reservoir were to drop through lower shortage levels to below 1,025 feet, the total cuts among the three states and Mexico would add up to more than 1.3 million acre-feet. That amount, Bernardo says, would equal nearly 20 feet conserved in Lake Mead at those low levels.
When representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada were negotiating the deal, they decided on 1,025 feet as a threshold to avoid, and one they thought the lake would be unlikely to reach. The agreement also includes a backup provision. If the two-year projections show Mead is likely to decline below 1,030 feet, the agreement says the states and the Interior secretary “shall consult and determine what additional measures will be taken.”
The government’s latest five-year projections, using an approach that considers the river’s lower flows over the past three decades, estimates a 25% chance of Lake Mead declining below 1,025 feet in 2025.
Much could change, though, with a snowy winter in the mountains.
“We hope and we feel very strongly that the measures that have been put into place should slow down the decline,” Bernardo says. “Now, if it's enough to make it recover, your guess is as good as mine, because the hydrology has been so bad.”
But if the river basin gets a wet year with average flows, Bernardo says, the cutbacks in the existing plan “will buy us time to get to the next year, in hopes to get a better water year.”
“And I think that's what the system is designed to do,” he says.
An ‘Era of Limits’
The outlook for the Colorado River has grown increasingly dire over the past several years. In one study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was due to unprecedented warming.
Other researchers warned in a report this year that an “incremental approach to adaptation” is unlikely to be enough in the future. They pointed out that flows from 2000 through 2018 were about 18% less than the 20th century average and said the downward trend will likely continue as temperatures rise with climate change.
Worries about overusing the river predate the current dry spell. In fact, some early warnings came before the legal framework that divided the Colorado among the seven states and Mexico.
John Wesley Powell famously voiced concerns in 1893, some 24 years after his expedition down the river in the Grand Canyon, when he told the attendees at the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles: “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”
Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, the river has long been severely overallocated. As University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon has succinctly put it, “there are more water rights than there is water.”
So much has been diverted that most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed decades ago into stretches of dry riverbed that wind through farmlands and desert in the Mexicali Valley. Only a smattering of natural wetlands remain.
A journey into the heart of a river forever changed by human hands
In his 1986 book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner wrote that Hoover Dam “rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food.”
But Reisner wrote that from these hopeful beginnings, “the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness” and that people in the river basin — at that time only 20 million — “will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe.”
“One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam,” Reisner wrote. “And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.”
More recently, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote in their 2019 book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River” that “even absent climate change, we would be in trouble” and that the current problems surrounding the river “are the inevitable result of critical decisions made by water managers and politicians who ignored the science” as early as the 1920s.
Scientific analyses in the 1920s found the Colorado River would be in deficit if dams and canals were built to meet the anticipated demand, Kuhn and Fleck wrote. But the scientists’ warnings were ignored, and that “set in motion decades of decisions that would end in the overuse seen today.”
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They suggested that addressing the river’s deficit will require recognizing that the “over-allocation became embedded in basin rules in very specific ways that remain unresolved” and should be fixed.
Negotiating the post-2026 rules will be challenging for everyone involved, Kuhn and Fleck wrote, and some of the fundamental issues facing negotiators now are similar to those a century ago, including questions of how much water the river will provide in the years ahead, and how the system should be governed amid uncertainty.
The Colorado River Basin needs “a stable and effective governance of the use of the river’s waters under conditions where current demands already exceed the exiting supplies,” Kuhn and Fleck wrote. “Like one hundred years ago, the river’s future is not all dark. Innovation, cooperation, and an expanded reliance on science are now the foundation for basin-wide solutions.”
One effort to restore some of the wetlands and ecosystems in Mexico began last month, as water began flowing into the delta under an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The water releases in the delta, which will total 35,000 acre-feet between May and October, are intended to nourish vegetation and wildlife at habitat restoration sites where conservation groups have planted cottonwoods and willows.
The influx of water is supposed to mimic a small portion of the floods that once swept across the delta toward the Sea of Cortez. This year’s releases amount to a smaller version of a planned flood that coursed through the delta in 2014. In that “pulse flow,” 105,000 acre-feet of water brought back a flowing river in areas that had been dry since floods in the late 1990s.
The releases in the delta this year, using water previously stored in Lake Mead, amount to just 5 inches of water in the reservoir. Much more of the water that passes through Hoover Dam is pumped to Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles, and flows through canals to irrigate farmlands along the river from Parker to Yuma, and across the Coachella, Imperial and Mexicali valleys.
The intake towers on the Arizona side, May 12, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The intake towers on the Arizona side, May 12, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
Low water levels bring risks
If the water were to decline about 125 feet from where it stands, below the elevation of 950 feet, he says, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.
“That's what we call minimum power pool,” Bernardo says.
If Mead continues to fall further, the dam could still release water down to a level of 895 feet.
“At 895 and below, Hoover Dam is unable to pass water by any conventional means. So you would essentially have to pump it out of Lake Mead. That's what we call dead pool,” Bernardo says. “And at dead pool, Lake Mead still has 2.5 million acre-feet in storage, but there's just no way to get it out.”
If the lake declines that much, only the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Las Vegas, has an intake deep enough to continue pumping water.
A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The risks of Mead falling to such lows gave impetus to the last round of negotiations, which led to the 2019 signing of the Drought Contingency Plan at Hoover Dam.
The river would have been in a shortage already years ago if the states and Mexico hadn’t made concerted efforts to prop up Lake Mead’s levels, Bernardo says, and those steps included various conservation programs that have yielded 4 million acre-feet over the past 15 years, representing about 50 feet of water in the lake.
But with the unrelenting dry years, he says, “we knew that we couldn't postpone a shortage forever.”
Mike Bernardo, of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, on the ramp at Hoover Dam on May 11, 2021.
He reiterates that the shortage measures, including the mandatory cutbacks, were adopted to reduce risks.
“And although it's scary that this will be the first time we're using them, they were designed by very smart people throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Bernardo says. “And let's hope that they work the way that they were designed to work.”
If the situation continues to worsen, he says, everyone involved in managing the river’s water will get together again, as stipulated in the 2019 agreements, to take steps to protect the reservoirs. With about 40 million people relying on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, he says, “all of us as water managers have a responsibility to all of those that are in the basin.”
By mid-June, Lake Mead is set to decline to its lowest levels on record. Hoover Dam will soon hold the smallest amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. The next few years may show how much water use needs to decrease to rebalance the river and reduce the risk that Hoover Dam might one day fall silent.
Follow reporter Ian James on Twitter: @ByIanJames.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ho ... 16884.html
Ian James, Arizona Republic
Sun, June 6, 2021, 2:20 PM
BOULDER CITY, Nevada — Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam.
In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men are shown gripping a boat’s wheel, harvesting an armful of wheat, standing beside cascading water and lifting a heavy weight overhead. With the concrete figures are words that encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER.
Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. But the rules for managing the river and dividing up its water — which were laid down nearly a century ago starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact and which have repeatedly been tweaked — are now facing the greatest strains since the dam was built.
The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are strikingly visible along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes.
Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is now just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled.
One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands, and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks.
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead photographed from the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge on May 10, 2021. A high-water mark or "bathtub ring" is visible on the shoreline.
Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer
Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the U.S. and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce.
Bernardo’s team also sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will likely change over the next 24 months.
Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers.
Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk due to extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow.
“Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.”
And that will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in both Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system.
The warm, dry conditions over the past two years have baked the watershed’s soils to such an extent, Bernardo says, that “when the snowmelt starts to run off, it just gets sucked up into the ground like a sponge.”
But the demands for water downstream from Hoover Dam continue. And with the Southwest’s farmlands in peak irrigation season through June, Bernardo says, Lake Mead’s surface is dropping about 1 foot each week.
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Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, at Hoover Dam in May 2021.
Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, at Hoover Dam in May 2021.
The reservoir has declined more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to fall about 9 feet more by the end of this year.
The latest projections show that by the end of 2021, Lake Mead will decline below an elevation of 1,066 feet, far below the threshold — 1,075 feet — for the federal government to declare a shortage. That’s expected to happen in August, triggering the largest water cuts to date next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
Even larger cutbacks could come in 2023 if the reservoir continues to decline as projected over the next year into a more severe “Tier 2” shortage.
Lake Mead's downward spiral is being driven largely by the dire situation upstream at Lake Powell, which has declined to 34% of full capacity.
“We need three to four consecutive years of above-average inflow, snowpack runoff and inflow into Lake Powell, to refill these reservoirs,” Bernardo says. “So that's what we're hoping for.”
The Colorado River naturally cycles through wet and dry periods. But over the past 22 years, the watershed has had 17 dry years, Bernardo says, and only 5 years with above-average or wet conditions.
With climate change, hotter temperatures have been evaporating more moisture off the landscape and leaving less flowing in the river and its tributaries. Scientists describe it as a “megadrought” and one that, unlike the long droughts of the past, is being amplified by carbon pollution and the heating of the planet.
One of the unknowns facing the officials who manage Colorado River water is just how severely the reservoirs could be affected by climate-driven “aridification” in the years to come. But some scientists have estimated the river could lose roughly one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures continue to rise, and that for each additional 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) of warming, the average flow is likely to drop by about 9%.
“With the warmer temperatures,” Bernardo says, “not only do we see things melt off quicker but you have that rising snow line, which creates less inflow.”
The Overton Arm of Lake Mead at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The reservoir has declined dramatically since 2000.
The Overton Arm of Lake Mead at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The reservoir has declined dramatically since 2000.
The declines in the reservoirs have accelerated over the past two years.
In 2019, representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California agreed under a deal called the Drought Contingency Plan to share in water reductions through 2026 to reduce the risks of Lake Mead falling to critically low levels. The agreement calls for progressively larger cutbacks if Lake Mead continues to drop below lower trigger points in the coming years.
If the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet, California would start to take cuts. And Mexico is already contributing by leaving some water in Lake Mead.
“These mechanisms have been put into place to protect these reservoir elevations,” Bernardo says.
While the latest agreement is intended as a temporary stopgap measure, officials from the seven states that depend on the river are preparing to negotiate new rules for managing shortages after 2026. And those talks promise to be tougher.
In the meantime, Bernardo says, the bureau's responsibilities in managing the dams and water deliveries remain the same. And that includes incorporating the latest science and models, and providing up-to-date information to representatives of the states, water districts, tribes and other entities along the river, Bernardo says, “to communicate what's going on and what we're seeing, so everyone can act proactively.”
“When you have a river system like this, a complex reservoir and river system especially, that is experiencing the hydrology that we've been seeing, and such a quick decline in the Upper Basin over these last two years, transparency and communication is key,” Bernardo says.
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Bernardo is 35 and has worked for the Bureau of Reclamation for nearly a decade, including the last two years as river operations manager. A mechanical engineer who grew up in New Jersey, he usually works with his staff at the agency’s office in Boulder City, Nevada, but he also regularly drives out to visit the dam, sometimes to lead special tours.
Whenever he rounds the curve in the canyon and sees the dam, Bernardo says, he feels awestruck and “the hair still sticks up on my arms.”
“It never gets old,” he says. “I’m wowed by the engineering marvel.”
Part of that comes from knowing the history of all that went into the dam’s design and construction during the Great Depression, from the hand-drawn blueprints to the blasting with dynamite, the railroad that carried supplies, and the massive amounts of concrete that were poured in, creating a dam that is 660 feet thick at its base — nearly as thick between the reservoir and the downstream side as it is tall. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 4-feet wide around the entire Earth at the equator.)
Whenever he visits the dam, Bernardo says, its historical significance is also inescapable: how it controlled the Colorado’s floods, opened up arid lands for farming and fed the rise of cities across the Southwest. As he describes it, the dam “helped nourish our nation” and helped the West thrive.
“We like to show it off,” he says.
With higher lake levels, Hoover Dam's normal capacity is 2,074 megawatts, Bernardo explains, generating enough power per year to supply approximately 450,000 average households. But at today’s lake level, the dam’s capacity has decreased about 25% to 1,567 megawatts, and it’s generating enough power for roughly 350,000 homes.
With every foot the lake declines, about 6 megawatts of power-generating capacity is lost.
The lowest level at which Hoover could produce power is about 950 feet, with an expected capacity of 650 megawatts. If the lake were to fall below that point — a scenario the existing rules are geared toward avoiding — the dam would no longer be able to generate power.
The generator/turbine gallery on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The generator/turbine gallery on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
As the reservoir continues to decline, releasing the same amount of water yields a bigger drop in lake level.
“That's one of the concerning pieces,” Bernardo says. “The reservoir is shaped, we call it a teacup, but more like a martini glass. And the lower the elevation goes, the faster the rate of decline.”
That dynamic also affects how much the planned water cuts can help Mead’s level. Under a first-tier shortage next year, for example, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico are preparing for cuts totaling 613,000 acre-feet, which Bernardo says is equivalent to 7-8 feet of elevation in Lake Mead.
If the reservoir were to drop through lower shortage levels to below 1,025 feet, the total cuts among the three states and Mexico would add up to more than 1.3 million acre-feet. That amount, Bernardo says, would equal nearly 20 feet conserved in Lake Mead at those low levels.
When representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada were negotiating the deal, they decided on 1,025 feet as a threshold to avoid, and one they thought the lake would be unlikely to reach. The agreement also includes a backup provision. If the two-year projections show Mead is likely to decline below 1,030 feet, the agreement says the states and the Interior secretary “shall consult and determine what additional measures will be taken.”
The government’s latest five-year projections, using an approach that considers the river’s lower flows over the past three decades, estimates a 25% chance of Lake Mead declining below 1,025 feet in 2025.
Much could change, though, with a snowy winter in the mountains.
“We hope and we feel very strongly that the measures that have been put into place should slow down the decline,” Bernardo says. “Now, if it's enough to make it recover, your guess is as good as mine, because the hydrology has been so bad.”
But if the river basin gets a wet year with average flows, Bernardo says, the cutbacks in the existing plan “will buy us time to get to the next year, in hopes to get a better water year.”
“And I think that's what the system is designed to do,” he says.
An ‘Era of Limits’
The outlook for the Colorado River has grown increasingly dire over the past several years. In one study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was due to unprecedented warming.
Other researchers warned in a report this year that an “incremental approach to adaptation” is unlikely to be enough in the future. They pointed out that flows from 2000 through 2018 were about 18% less than the 20th century average and said the downward trend will likely continue as temperatures rise with climate change.
Worries about overusing the river predate the current dry spell. In fact, some early warnings came before the legal framework that divided the Colorado among the seven states and Mexico.
John Wesley Powell famously voiced concerns in 1893, some 24 years after his expedition down the river in the Grand Canyon, when he told the attendees at the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles: “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”
Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, the river has long been severely overallocated. As University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon has succinctly put it, “there are more water rights than there is water.”
So much has been diverted that most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed decades ago into stretches of dry riverbed that wind through farmlands and desert in the Mexicali Valley. Only a smattering of natural wetlands remain.
A journey into the heart of a river forever changed by human hands
In his 1986 book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner wrote that Hoover Dam “rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food.”
But Reisner wrote that from these hopeful beginnings, “the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness” and that people in the river basin — at that time only 20 million — “will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe.”
“One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam,” Reisner wrote. “And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.”
More recently, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote in their 2019 book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River” that “even absent climate change, we would be in trouble” and that the current problems surrounding the river “are the inevitable result of critical decisions made by water managers and politicians who ignored the science” as early as the 1920s.
Scientific analyses in the 1920s found the Colorado River would be in deficit if dams and canals were built to meet the anticipated demand, Kuhn and Fleck wrote. But the scientists’ warnings were ignored, and that “set in motion decades of decisions that would end in the overuse seen today.”
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They suggested that addressing the river’s deficit will require recognizing that the “over-allocation became embedded in basin rules in very specific ways that remain unresolved” and should be fixed.
Negotiating the post-2026 rules will be challenging for everyone involved, Kuhn and Fleck wrote, and some of the fundamental issues facing negotiators now are similar to those a century ago, including questions of how much water the river will provide in the years ahead, and how the system should be governed amid uncertainty.
The Colorado River Basin needs “a stable and effective governance of the use of the river’s waters under conditions where current demands already exceed the exiting supplies,” Kuhn and Fleck wrote. “Like one hundred years ago, the river’s future is not all dark. Innovation, cooperation, and an expanded reliance on science are now the foundation for basin-wide solutions.”
One effort to restore some of the wetlands and ecosystems in Mexico began last month, as water began flowing into the delta under an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The water releases in the delta, which will total 35,000 acre-feet between May and October, are intended to nourish vegetation and wildlife at habitat restoration sites where conservation groups have planted cottonwoods and willows.
The influx of water is supposed to mimic a small portion of the floods that once swept across the delta toward the Sea of Cortez. This year’s releases amount to a smaller version of a planned flood that coursed through the delta in 2014. In that “pulse flow,” 105,000 acre-feet of water brought back a flowing river in areas that had been dry since floods in the late 1990s.
The releases in the delta this year, using water previously stored in Lake Mead, amount to just 5 inches of water in the reservoir. Much more of the water that passes through Hoover Dam is pumped to Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles, and flows through canals to irrigate farmlands along the river from Parker to Yuma, and across the Coachella, Imperial and Mexicali valleys.
The intake towers on the Arizona side, May 12, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The intake towers on the Arizona side, May 12, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
Low water levels bring risks
If the water were to decline about 125 feet from where it stands, below the elevation of 950 feet, he says, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.
“That's what we call minimum power pool,” Bernardo says.
If Mead continues to fall further, the dam could still release water down to a level of 895 feet.
“At 895 and below, Hoover Dam is unable to pass water by any conventional means. So you would essentially have to pump it out of Lake Mead. That's what we call dead pool,” Bernardo says. “And at dead pool, Lake Mead still has 2.5 million acre-feet in storage, but there's just no way to get it out.”
If the lake declines that much, only the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Las Vegas, has an intake deep enough to continue pumping water.
A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.
The risks of Mead falling to such lows gave impetus to the last round of negotiations, which led to the 2019 signing of the Drought Contingency Plan at Hoover Dam.
The river would have been in a shortage already years ago if the states and Mexico hadn’t made concerted efforts to prop up Lake Mead’s levels, Bernardo says, and those steps included various conservation programs that have yielded 4 million acre-feet over the past 15 years, representing about 50 feet of water in the lake.
But with the unrelenting dry years, he says, “we knew that we couldn't postpone a shortage forever.”
Mike Bernardo, of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, on the ramp at Hoover Dam on May 11, 2021.
He reiterates that the shortage measures, including the mandatory cutbacks, were adopted to reduce risks.
“And although it's scary that this will be the first time we're using them, they were designed by very smart people throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Bernardo says. “And let's hope that they work the way that they were designed to work.”
If the situation continues to worsen, he says, everyone involved in managing the river’s water will get together again, as stipulated in the 2019 agreements, to take steps to protect the reservoirs. With about 40 million people relying on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, he says, “all of us as water managers have a responsibility to all of those that are in the basin.”
By mid-June, Lake Mead is set to decline to its lowest levels on record. Hoover Dam will soon hold the smallest amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. The next few years may show how much water use needs to decrease to rebalance the river and reduce the risk that Hoover Dam might one day fall silent.
Follow reporter Ian James on Twitter: @ByIanJames.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ho ... 16884.html
This Inspiring Film Could Change The World
Hi Karim,
Four years ago, my friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Herring called me with a fire in his heart. He had decided to make it his mission to educate people about sustainability and what we humans can do to create a lasting future for our children and grandchildren.
Rob was in the middle of filming a new documentary on the topic and was looking for guidance on how to turn it into something that could have a huge impact. I told him that he had me at "a lasting future for our children."
After a ton of hard work (and plenty of serendipity), this remarkable film called The Need To GROW is airing online for FREE...and I have a feeling it might just change the world.
If you watch the trailer below, I think you'll agree
Watch the trailer here https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?orid=127162&opid=314
The Need To GROW is a deeply moving, award-winning documentary that will open your eyes to huge issues in our food system that you may not know about. It will leave you feeling informed and inspired about what you can do to impact the health of your loved ones (and the health of our planet) for the better.
You'll recognize the narrator too! The environmentalist and actress Rosario Dawson gives voice to the film's important message: we must learn how to sustainably grow food for future generations.
I dare you not to get emotional while watching this film...
Click here to watch it for free https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?orid=127162&opid=314
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
Hi Karim,
Four years ago, my friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Herring called me with a fire in his heart. He had decided to make it his mission to educate people about sustainability and what we humans can do to create a lasting future for our children and grandchildren.
Rob was in the middle of filming a new documentary on the topic and was looking for guidance on how to turn it into something that could have a huge impact. I told him that he had me at "a lasting future for our children."
After a ton of hard work (and plenty of serendipity), this remarkable film called The Need To GROW is airing online for FREE...and I have a feeling it might just change the world.
If you watch the trailer below, I think you'll agree
Watch the trailer here https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?orid=127162&opid=314
The Need To GROW is a deeply moving, award-winning documentary that will open your eyes to huge issues in our food system that you may not know about. It will leave you feeling informed and inspired about what you can do to impact the health of your loved ones (and the health of our planet) for the better.
You'll recognize the narrator too! The environmentalist and actress Rosario Dawson gives voice to the film's important message: we must learn how to sustainably grow food for future generations.
I dare you not to get emotional while watching this film...
Click here to watch it for free https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?orid=127162&opid=314
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
People who live past 100 usually do one thing...
Hi Karim,
There’s a common activity among cultures where people who routinely live past 100... Research shows almost ALL of them grow vegetables!
And it makes sense. Because more and more studies are showing that gardening can reduce stress, anger, fatigue, depression, and anxiety... all of which can help increase both a person’s life span and health span.
Not to mention that you can grow the healthiest, freshest, most nutrient-packed, and delicious superfoods on the planet!
That’s why my good friend and gardening expert, Stacey Murphy, is teaming up with 16 visionary gardeners and superfood experts (including yours truly!) for the Superfood Garden Summit.
So you can learn to grow fresh, organic food right at home and enjoy a higher quality of life... Imagine all that nutrient-rich, supercharged food, flavor, and FUN!
The Superfood Garden Summit is the gardening event of the summer. And it’s a totally free and LIVE event, airing from July 21-24.
>> Click here to claim your spot at the Superfood Garden Summit.
https://superfoodgardensummit.com/?orid=13188&opid=291
Yours for homegrown health,
Ocean Robbins
P.S. This will be a LIVE, interactive event from July 21-24. Come get your questions answered and chat with fellow gardeners around the world. Plus, enter to win prizes that will help you get the most from your garden! (And if you can’t join in live, don’t worry; there will also be 24-hour replays).
Reserve your spot today.
Hi Karim,
There’s a common activity among cultures where people who routinely live past 100... Research shows almost ALL of them grow vegetables!
And it makes sense. Because more and more studies are showing that gardening can reduce stress, anger, fatigue, depression, and anxiety... all of which can help increase both a person’s life span and health span.
Not to mention that you can grow the healthiest, freshest, most nutrient-packed, and delicious superfoods on the planet!
That’s why my good friend and gardening expert, Stacey Murphy, is teaming up with 16 visionary gardeners and superfood experts (including yours truly!) for the Superfood Garden Summit.
So you can learn to grow fresh, organic food right at home and enjoy a higher quality of life... Imagine all that nutrient-rich, supercharged food, flavor, and FUN!
The Superfood Garden Summit is the gardening event of the summer. And it’s a totally free and LIVE event, airing from July 21-24.
>> Click here to claim your spot at the Superfood Garden Summit.
https://superfoodgardensummit.com/?orid=13188&opid=291
Yours for homegrown health,
Ocean Robbins
P.S. This will be a LIVE, interactive event from July 21-24. Come get your questions answered and chat with fellow gardeners around the world. Plus, enter to win prizes that will help you get the most from your garden! (And if you can’t join in live, don’t worry; there will also be 24-hour replays).
Reserve your spot today.
Drought Hits the Southwest, and New Mexico’s Canals Run Dry
Acequias, the fabled irrigation ditches that are a cornerstone of New Mexican culture, have endured centuries of challenges. Can they survive the Southwest’s megadrought?
LEDOUX, N.M. — Nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the remote village of Ledoux has for more than a century relied on a network of irrigation ditches to water its crops. The outpost’s acequias, as New Mexico’s fabled canals are known, are replenished annually by snowmelt and rains. But with the Southwest locked in an unrelenting drought, they have begun to run dry.
“I never thought I’d witness such a crash in our water sources,” said Harold Trujillo, 71, a farmer in Ledoux who has seen his production of hay collapse to about 300 bales a year from 6,000. “I look at the mountains around us and ask: ‘Where’s the snow? Where are the rains?’”
Acequias — pronounced ah-SEH-kee-ahs — borrow their name from the Arabic term for water conduit, al-sāqiya. They are celebrated in song, books and verse, and they have endured in the state for centuries. Spanish colonists in New Mexico began digging the canals in the 1600s, building on water harvesting techniques honed by the Pueblo Indians.
Even then, the acequia reflected the blending of cultural traditions. Muslims introduced acequias in Spain after invading the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century, using gravity to manage irrigation flows. Acequias eventually spread around the Spanish-speaking world.
Making subsistence farming feasible in arid lands, New Mexico’s communally managed acequias persisted through uprisings, epidemics and wars of territorial conquest, preserving a form of small-scale democratic governance that took root before the United States existed as a country.
But in a sign of how climate change has begun to upend farming traditions across the Southwest, the megadrought afflicting New Mexico and neighboring states may amount to the acequias’ biggest challenge yet.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/us/a ... iversified
Acequias, the fabled irrigation ditches that are a cornerstone of New Mexican culture, have endured centuries of challenges. Can they survive the Southwest’s megadrought?
LEDOUX, N.M. — Nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the remote village of Ledoux has for more than a century relied on a network of irrigation ditches to water its crops. The outpost’s acequias, as New Mexico’s fabled canals are known, are replenished annually by snowmelt and rains. But with the Southwest locked in an unrelenting drought, they have begun to run dry.
“I never thought I’d witness such a crash in our water sources,” said Harold Trujillo, 71, a farmer in Ledoux who has seen his production of hay collapse to about 300 bales a year from 6,000. “I look at the mountains around us and ask: ‘Where’s the snow? Where are the rains?’”
Acequias — pronounced ah-SEH-kee-ahs — borrow their name from the Arabic term for water conduit, al-sāqiya. They are celebrated in song, books and verse, and they have endured in the state for centuries. Spanish colonists in New Mexico began digging the canals in the 1600s, building on water harvesting techniques honed by the Pueblo Indians.
Even then, the acequia reflected the blending of cultural traditions. Muslims introduced acequias in Spain after invading the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century, using gravity to manage irrigation flows. Acequias eventually spread around the Spanish-speaking world.
Making subsistence farming feasible in arid lands, New Mexico’s communally managed acequias persisted through uprisings, epidemics and wars of territorial conquest, preserving a form of small-scale democratic governance that took root before the United States existed as a country.
But in a sign of how climate change has begun to upend farming traditions across the Southwest, the megadrought afflicting New Mexico and neighboring states may amount to the acequias’ biggest challenge yet.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/us/a ... iversified
Sustainable food production aims to meet growing demand
Agriculture is one of the world's largest industries. For years it has been pivotal in alleviating poverty, improving incomes, and providing food security for the marginalised in society. With the world’s population multiplying, the demand for agricultural commodities has risen tremendously in the past few decades.
In several parts of the world, food production is significantly impacted by climatic changes such as the increased frequency of storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events, thereby altering regional growing conditions and making them less predictable. Several new technologies have been identified to overcome such issues that can transform the entire food chain, from production and processing to consumption and waste management.
Urban agriculture, commonly known as urban farming, refers to growing plants and rearing animals that produce food within a city or town. Because of technological upgrades, humans are now able to grow food in places where it was previously difficult or nearly impossible. Urban farms can be either traditional small community gardens or modern indoor vertical farms.
Nabeela Lakhani was one of ten farmer-entrepreneurs in the pilot programme of Square Roots Grow, an urban farming accelerator in New York City. For 12 months, each farmer was given a 320-square-foot steel shipping container where they controlled the climate of their farm. Under pink LED lights, they grew GMO-free greens all year round. The crops thriving inside the 45-foot long metal boxes were fed hydroponically, using a liquid nutrient solution instead of soil. Being trained in artificial lighting, water chemistry, and nutrient balance, these farmers harvested 15 to 20 pounds of produce each week.
“One of the biggest problems I have with the current industrial food system is that it has stripped food down to a profit-making commodity, driven by money and power rather than nourishment,” said Nabeela.
“I hope that this technology will usher in a new age in which people will increasingly gravitate toward hyper-local, pesticide-free crops. As all we are looking for - is food that we can trust.”
Urban agriculture is experiencing burgeoning popularity, with gardens springing up in many cities in Australia, Canada, the United States, the UK, France, and New Zealand.
Food insecurity is especially rife in high altitude mountainous regions and has a serious bearing on the health of local residents. Because of prolonged winters and limited growing seasons, their basic nutritional requirements remain unfulfilled, thus resulting in malnutrition among women and children. In Tajikistan, 18 per cent of children under the age of five are stunted( low height-for-weight), and 6 per cent have a low wasting ratio (low weight-for-height). Facing high levels of undernutrition, it is one of the focus countries for the ‘Feed the Future’ global hunger and food security initiative. To further combat these issues, the Aga Khan Foundation has also demonstrated the construction of greenhouses that allow people to grow vegetables locally, fulfil basic nutritional requirements, and earn some extra income.
Last year, an emergency project was planned to reduce Tajikistan's vulnerability to Covid-19-related food insecurity. This project aimed to benefit an estimated 12,000 people directly and about 80,000 indirectly. It focused on increasing agriculture production and output by providing critical irrigation infrastructure and improved access to quality agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilisers. The Aga Khan Foundation, with the support of the Government of Switzerland, has successfully launched the project in 12 districts of the Khatlon region, Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, Sughd region, and Rasht Valley of Tajikistan.
As the world population grows toward nearly 10 billion people in 2050, demand for food is expected to grow by more than 50 per cent. More effective and responsible production practices like advanced farming operations, conscious supply chains, and new market opportunities will be needed to meet this growing demand in the years ahead. As we rapidly reach the limits of what our natural environment can endure, new technologies like vertical farming, precision farming, and many others will hopefully build a better future for humankind.
https://the.ismaili/global/sustainable- ... ing-demand
Agriculture is one of the world's largest industries. For years it has been pivotal in alleviating poverty, improving incomes, and providing food security for the marginalised in society. With the world’s population multiplying, the demand for agricultural commodities has risen tremendously in the past few decades.
In several parts of the world, food production is significantly impacted by climatic changes such as the increased frequency of storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events, thereby altering regional growing conditions and making them less predictable. Several new technologies have been identified to overcome such issues that can transform the entire food chain, from production and processing to consumption and waste management.
Urban agriculture, commonly known as urban farming, refers to growing plants and rearing animals that produce food within a city or town. Because of technological upgrades, humans are now able to grow food in places where it was previously difficult or nearly impossible. Urban farms can be either traditional small community gardens or modern indoor vertical farms.
Nabeela Lakhani was one of ten farmer-entrepreneurs in the pilot programme of Square Roots Grow, an urban farming accelerator in New York City. For 12 months, each farmer was given a 320-square-foot steel shipping container where they controlled the climate of their farm. Under pink LED lights, they grew GMO-free greens all year round. The crops thriving inside the 45-foot long metal boxes were fed hydroponically, using a liquid nutrient solution instead of soil. Being trained in artificial lighting, water chemistry, and nutrient balance, these farmers harvested 15 to 20 pounds of produce each week.
“One of the biggest problems I have with the current industrial food system is that it has stripped food down to a profit-making commodity, driven by money and power rather than nourishment,” said Nabeela.
“I hope that this technology will usher in a new age in which people will increasingly gravitate toward hyper-local, pesticide-free crops. As all we are looking for - is food that we can trust.”
Urban agriculture is experiencing burgeoning popularity, with gardens springing up in many cities in Australia, Canada, the United States, the UK, France, and New Zealand.
Food insecurity is especially rife in high altitude mountainous regions and has a serious bearing on the health of local residents. Because of prolonged winters and limited growing seasons, their basic nutritional requirements remain unfulfilled, thus resulting in malnutrition among women and children. In Tajikistan, 18 per cent of children under the age of five are stunted( low height-for-weight), and 6 per cent have a low wasting ratio (low weight-for-height). Facing high levels of undernutrition, it is one of the focus countries for the ‘Feed the Future’ global hunger and food security initiative. To further combat these issues, the Aga Khan Foundation has also demonstrated the construction of greenhouses that allow people to grow vegetables locally, fulfil basic nutritional requirements, and earn some extra income.
Last year, an emergency project was planned to reduce Tajikistan's vulnerability to Covid-19-related food insecurity. This project aimed to benefit an estimated 12,000 people directly and about 80,000 indirectly. It focused on increasing agriculture production and output by providing critical irrigation infrastructure and improved access to quality agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilisers. The Aga Khan Foundation, with the support of the Government of Switzerland, has successfully launched the project in 12 districts of the Khatlon region, Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, Sughd region, and Rasht Valley of Tajikistan.
As the world population grows toward nearly 10 billion people in 2050, demand for food is expected to grow by more than 50 per cent. More effective and responsible production practices like advanced farming operations, conscious supply chains, and new market opportunities will be needed to meet this growing demand in the years ahead. As we rapidly reach the limits of what our natural environment can endure, new technologies like vertical farming, precision farming, and many others will hopefully build a better future for humankind.
https://the.ismaili/global/sustainable- ... ing-demand
Unprecedented levels of dam building and water extraction by nations on great rivers are leaving countries further downstream increasingly thirsty, increasing the risk of conflicts.
Speaking to me via Zoom from his flat in Amsterdam, Ali al-Sadr pauses to take a sip from a clear glass of water. The irony dawning on him, he lets out a laugh. "Before I left Iraq, I struggled every day to find clean drinking water." Three years earlier, al-Sadr had joined protests in the streets of his native Basra, demanding the authorities address the city's growing water crisis.
"Before the war, Basra was a beautiful place," adds the 29-year-old. "They used to call us the Venice of the East." Bordered on one side by the Shatt al-Arab River, the city is skewered by a network of freshwater canals. al-Sadr, a dockhand, once loved working alongside them. "But by the time I left, they were pumping raw sewage into the waterways. We couldn't wash, the smell [of the river] gave me migraines and, when I finally fell sick, I spent four days in bed." In the summer of 2018, tainted water sent 120,000 Basrans to the city's hospitals – and, when police opened fire on those who protested, al Sadr was lucky to escape with his life. "Within a month I packed my bags and left for Europe," he says.
Around the world, stories like al Sadr's are becoming far too common. As much as a quarter of the world's population now faces severe water scarcity at least one month out of the year and – as in al-Sadr's case – it is leading many to seek a more secure life in other countries. "If there is no water, people will start to move," says Kitty van der Heijden, chief of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry and an expert in hydropolitics. Water scarcity affects roughly 40% of the world's population and, according to predictions by the United Nations and the World Bank, drought could put up to 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030. People like van der Heijden are concerned about what that could lead to.
"If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," she says.
Over the course of the 20th Century, global water use grew at more than twice the rate of population increase. Today, this dissonance is leading many cities – from Rome to Cape Town, Chennai to Lima – to ration water. Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012. In 2017, severe droughts contributed to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two, when 20 million people across Africa and the Middle East were forced to leave their homes due to the accompanying food shortages and conflicts that erupted.
Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, has spent the last three decades studying the link between water scarcity, conflict and migration and believes that water conflict is on the rise. "With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst," he says. "But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water."
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... ewing-wars
40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River. It’s Drying Up Fast.
On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults, and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, three-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest fresh water reservoir, Lake Mead.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40 percent full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left, and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20 percent, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50 percent by the end of this century.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/sund ... 778d3e6de3
On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults, and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, three-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest fresh water reservoir, Lake Mead.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40 percent full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left, and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20 percent, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50 percent by the end of this century.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/sund ... 778d3e6de3
Facing Economic Collapse, Afghanistan Is Gripped by Starvation
An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe.
SHAH WALI KOT, Afghanistan — One by one, women poured into the mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the folds of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas.
Many had walked for more than an hour across this drab stretch of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a washed-out sky, desperate for medicine to pump life back into their children’s shrunken veins. For months, their once-daily meals had grown more sparse as harvests failed, wells ran dry and credit for flour from shopkeepers ran out.
Now as the crisp air grew colder, reality was setting in: Their children might not survive the winter.
“I’m very afraid, this winter will be even worse than we can imagine,” said Laltak, 40, who like many women in rural Afghanistan goes by only one name.
Nearly four months since the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years.
While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity, according to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization. Of those, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — the worst stage of a food crisis.
Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and U.S. sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.
Across the country, millions of Afghans — from day laborers to doctors and teachers — have gone months without steady or any incomes. The prices of food and other basic goods have soared beyond the reach of many families. Emaciated children and anemic mothers have flooded into the malnutrition wards of hospitals, many of those facilities bereft of medical supplies that donor aid once provided.
Compounding its economic woes, the country is confronting one of the worst droughts in decades, which has withered fields, starved farm animals and dried irrigation channels. Afghanistan’s wheat harvest is expected to be as much as 25 percent below average this year, according to the United Nations. In rural areas — where roughly 70 percent of the population lives — many farmers have given up cultivating their land.
Now, as freezing winter weather sets in, with humanitarian organizations warning that a million children could die, the crisis is potentially damning to both the new Taliban government and to the United States, which is facing mounting pressure to ease the economic restrictions that are worsening the crisis.
“We need to separate the politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Program’s country director for Afghanistan. “The millions of women, of children, of men in the current crisis in Afghanistan are innocent people who are being condemned to a winter of absolute desperation and potentially death.”
In Shah Wali Kot, a barren district in Kandahar Province, the drought and economic crash have converged in a perfect storm.
For decades, small farmers survived the winters on stored wheat from their summer harvest and the income from selling onions in the market. But this year yielded barely enough to sustain families during the fall months. Without food to last the winter, some people migrated to cities hoping to find work or to other districts to lean on the help of relatives.
Inside one of the two mud huts of the clinic, which is run by the Afghan Red Crescent and supported by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Laltak clutched her granddaughter’s gaunt frame as if steeling herself for the hardships she knew this winter would bring.
Her family has no wheat left, no wood to make fires for heat, no money to buy food. They have exhausted the support of nearby relatives who cannot even feed their own families.
“Nothing, we have nothing,” Laltak said in an interview at the end of October.
She and most of the mothers interviewed did not own cellphones or have phone service in their villages, so The Times could not follow up with them on the health of their children.
The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan comes as hunger has steadily risen around the world in recent years, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, conflict and climate-related shocks.
Thirty percent more Afghans faced crisis-level food shortages in September and October compared with the same period last year, according to the United Nations. In the coming months, the number of Afghans in crisis is expected to hit a record high.
“It was never this bad,” said Sifatullah Sifat, the head doctor at the Shamsul Haq clinic on the outskirts of Kandahar city, where malnutrition cases have doubled in recent months. “Donors are shipping in medicine, but it’s still not enough.”
By 10 a.m. each morning, a throng of mothers carrying skeletal children masses in the hallway of the malnutrition unit.
Inside an examination room in October, Zarmina, 20, cradled her 18-month-old son while her 3-year-old daughter stood behind her, clutching her blue burqa. Since the Taliban seized power and her husband’s work as a day laborer dried up, her family has survived on mostly bread and tea — meals that left her children’s stomachs gnawing with hunger.
“They are crying to have food. I wish I could bring them something, but we have nothing,” said Zarmina, who is six months pregnant and severely anemic.
Zarmina’s son had grown frail after weeks of diarrhea. He stared blankly at the wall as a nurse wrapped a color-coded measuring band used to diagnose malnutrition around his rail-thin arm, stopping at the color red: Severe malnourishment.
As the nurse told Zarmina that he needed to go to the hospital for treatment, another mother barged into the room and collapsed on the floor, demanding help for her infant daughter.
“It’s been almost one week, I can’t get medicine for her,” she pleaded.
The nurse begged her to wait: Her daughter’s malnutrition was considered only moderate.
Since the Taliban seized power, the United States and other Western donors have grappled with delicate questions over how to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan without granting the new regime legitimacy by removing sanctions or putting money directly into the Taliban’s hands.
“We believe that it’s essential that we maintain our sanctions against the Taliban but at the same time find ways for legitimate humanitarian assistance to get to the Afghan people. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” the deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, told the Senate Banking Committee in October.
But as the humanitarian situation has worsened, aid organizations have called on the United States to move more quickly.
American officials showed some flexibility around loosening the economic chokehold on Afghanistan last week, when the World Bank’s board — which includes the United States — moved to free up $280 million in frozen donor funding for the World Food Program and UNICEF. Still, the sum is just a portion of the $1.5 billion frozen by the World Bank amid pressure from the United States Treasury after the Taliban took control.
How those released funds will be transferred into Afghanistan remains unclear. Despite letters that the U.S. Treasury Department recently issued to foreign banks assuring them they can process humanitarian transactions to Afghanistan, many financial institutions remain fearful of exposure to U.S. sanctions.
The Taliban government has repeatedly called on the Biden administration to ease economic restrictions and has worked with international organizations to deliver some assistance. But already, millions of Afghans have been pushed over the edge.
At Mirwais Regional Hospital in Kandahar this fall, children suffering from malnutrition and disease crowded onto the pediatric ward’s worn metal beds. In the intensive care unit, an eerie silence filled the large room as children too weak to cry visibly wasted away, their breath labored and skin sagging off protruding bones.
“I wanted to bring her to the hospital earlier,” said Rooqia, 40, looking down at her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amina. “But I had no money, I couldn’t come.”
Like many other mothers and grandmothers in the ward, they had come from western Kandahar where over the past two years irrigation channels have run dry and more recently, pantries emptied. Amina started to shrivel — her skin so drained of life-sustaining vitamins that patches peeled away.
On a bed nearby, Madina, 2, let out a soft wail as her grandmother, Harzato, 50, readjusted her sweater. Harzato had taken the girl to the local pharmacist three times begging for medicine until he told her there was nothing more he could do: Only a doctor could save the child.
“We were so far from the hospital, I was worried and depressed,” Harzato said. “I thought she might not make it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe.
SHAH WALI KOT, Afghanistan — One by one, women poured into the mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the folds of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas.
Many had walked for more than an hour across this drab stretch of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a washed-out sky, desperate for medicine to pump life back into their children’s shrunken veins. For months, their once-daily meals had grown more sparse as harvests failed, wells ran dry and credit for flour from shopkeepers ran out.
Now as the crisp air grew colder, reality was setting in: Their children might not survive the winter.
“I’m very afraid, this winter will be even worse than we can imagine,” said Laltak, 40, who like many women in rural Afghanistan goes by only one name.
Nearly four months since the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years.
While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity, according to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization. Of those, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — the worst stage of a food crisis.
Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and U.S. sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.
Across the country, millions of Afghans — from day laborers to doctors and teachers — have gone months without steady or any incomes. The prices of food and other basic goods have soared beyond the reach of many families. Emaciated children and anemic mothers have flooded into the malnutrition wards of hospitals, many of those facilities bereft of medical supplies that donor aid once provided.
Compounding its economic woes, the country is confronting one of the worst droughts in decades, which has withered fields, starved farm animals and dried irrigation channels. Afghanistan’s wheat harvest is expected to be as much as 25 percent below average this year, according to the United Nations. In rural areas — where roughly 70 percent of the population lives — many farmers have given up cultivating their land.
Now, as freezing winter weather sets in, with humanitarian organizations warning that a million children could die, the crisis is potentially damning to both the new Taliban government and to the United States, which is facing mounting pressure to ease the economic restrictions that are worsening the crisis.
“We need to separate the politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Program’s country director for Afghanistan. “The millions of women, of children, of men in the current crisis in Afghanistan are innocent people who are being condemned to a winter of absolute desperation and potentially death.”
In Shah Wali Kot, a barren district in Kandahar Province, the drought and economic crash have converged in a perfect storm.
For decades, small farmers survived the winters on stored wheat from their summer harvest and the income from selling onions in the market. But this year yielded barely enough to sustain families during the fall months. Without food to last the winter, some people migrated to cities hoping to find work or to other districts to lean on the help of relatives.
Inside one of the two mud huts of the clinic, which is run by the Afghan Red Crescent and supported by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Laltak clutched her granddaughter’s gaunt frame as if steeling herself for the hardships she knew this winter would bring.
Her family has no wheat left, no wood to make fires for heat, no money to buy food. They have exhausted the support of nearby relatives who cannot even feed their own families.
“Nothing, we have nothing,” Laltak said in an interview at the end of October.
She and most of the mothers interviewed did not own cellphones or have phone service in their villages, so The Times could not follow up with them on the health of their children.
The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan comes as hunger has steadily risen around the world in recent years, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, conflict and climate-related shocks.
Thirty percent more Afghans faced crisis-level food shortages in September and October compared with the same period last year, according to the United Nations. In the coming months, the number of Afghans in crisis is expected to hit a record high.
“It was never this bad,” said Sifatullah Sifat, the head doctor at the Shamsul Haq clinic on the outskirts of Kandahar city, where malnutrition cases have doubled in recent months. “Donors are shipping in medicine, but it’s still not enough.”
By 10 a.m. each morning, a throng of mothers carrying skeletal children masses in the hallway of the malnutrition unit.
Inside an examination room in October, Zarmina, 20, cradled her 18-month-old son while her 3-year-old daughter stood behind her, clutching her blue burqa. Since the Taliban seized power and her husband’s work as a day laborer dried up, her family has survived on mostly bread and tea — meals that left her children’s stomachs gnawing with hunger.
“They are crying to have food. I wish I could bring them something, but we have nothing,” said Zarmina, who is six months pregnant and severely anemic.
Zarmina’s son had grown frail after weeks of diarrhea. He stared blankly at the wall as a nurse wrapped a color-coded measuring band used to diagnose malnutrition around his rail-thin arm, stopping at the color red: Severe malnourishment.
As the nurse told Zarmina that he needed to go to the hospital for treatment, another mother barged into the room and collapsed on the floor, demanding help for her infant daughter.
“It’s been almost one week, I can’t get medicine for her,” she pleaded.
The nurse begged her to wait: Her daughter’s malnutrition was considered only moderate.
Since the Taliban seized power, the United States and other Western donors have grappled with delicate questions over how to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan without granting the new regime legitimacy by removing sanctions or putting money directly into the Taliban’s hands.
“We believe that it’s essential that we maintain our sanctions against the Taliban but at the same time find ways for legitimate humanitarian assistance to get to the Afghan people. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” the deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, told the Senate Banking Committee in October.
But as the humanitarian situation has worsened, aid organizations have called on the United States to move more quickly.
American officials showed some flexibility around loosening the economic chokehold on Afghanistan last week, when the World Bank’s board — which includes the United States — moved to free up $280 million in frozen donor funding for the World Food Program and UNICEF. Still, the sum is just a portion of the $1.5 billion frozen by the World Bank amid pressure from the United States Treasury after the Taliban took control.
How those released funds will be transferred into Afghanistan remains unclear. Despite letters that the U.S. Treasury Department recently issued to foreign banks assuring them they can process humanitarian transactions to Afghanistan, many financial institutions remain fearful of exposure to U.S. sanctions.
The Taliban government has repeatedly called on the Biden administration to ease economic restrictions and has worked with international organizations to deliver some assistance. But already, millions of Afghans have been pushed over the edge.
At Mirwais Regional Hospital in Kandahar this fall, children suffering from malnutrition and disease crowded onto the pediatric ward’s worn metal beds. In the intensive care unit, an eerie silence filled the large room as children too weak to cry visibly wasted away, their breath labored and skin sagging off protruding bones.
“I wanted to bring her to the hospital earlier,” said Rooqia, 40, looking down at her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amina. “But I had no money, I couldn’t come.”
Like many other mothers and grandmothers in the ward, they had come from western Kandahar where over the past two years irrigation channels have run dry and more recently, pantries emptied. Amina started to shrivel — her skin so drained of life-sustaining vitamins that patches peeled away.
On a bed nearby, Madina, 2, let out a soft wail as her grandmother, Harzato, 50, readjusted her sweater. Harzato had taken the girl to the local pharmacist three times begging for medicine until he told her there was nothing more he could do: Only a doctor could save the child.
“We were so far from the hospital, I was worried and depressed,” Harzato said. “I thought she might not make it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Food Prices Approach Record Highs, Threatening the World’s Poorest
The prices have climbed to their highest level since 2011, according to a U.N. index. It could cause social unrest “on a widespread scale,” one expert said.
WASHINGTON — Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.
The increases have affected items as varied as grains, vegetable oils, butter, pasta, beef and coffee. They come as farmers around the globe face an array of challenges, including drought and ice storms that have ruined crops, rising prices for fertilizer and fuel, and pandemic-related labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that make it difficult to get products to market.
A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.
Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said that food price increases would strain incomes in poorer countries, especially in some parts of Latin America and Africa, where some people may spend up to 50 or 60 percent of their income on food.
He said that it wasn’t “much of an exaggeration” to say the world was approaching a global food crisis, and that slower growth, high unemployment and stressed budgets from governments that have spent heavily to combat the pandemic had created “a perfect storm of adverse circumstances.”
“There’s a lot of cause for worry about social unrest on a widespread scale,” he added.
Even before the pandemic, global food prices had been trending upward as disease wiped out much of China’s pig herd and the U.S.-China trade war resulted in Chinese tariffs on American agricultural goods.
But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home. Some American farmers who could not get their products into the hands of consumers were forced to dump milk in their fields and cull their herds.
Two years later, global demand for food remains strong, but higher fuel prices and shipping costs, along with other supply chain bottlenecks like a shortage of truck drivers and shipping containers, continue to push up prices, said Christian Bogmans, an economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Drought and bad weather in major agricultural producing countries like Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Russia and Ukraine have worsened the situation.
The I.M.F.’s data shows that average food inflation across the world reached 6.85 percent on an annualized basis in December, the highest level since their series started in 2014. Between April 2020 and December 2021, the price of soybeans soared 52 percent, and corn and wheat both grew 80 percent, the fund’s data showed, while the price of coffee rose 70 percent, due largely to droughts and frost in Brazil.
While food prices appear set to stabilize, events like a conflict in Ukraine, a major producer of wheat and corn, or further adverse weather could change that calculation, Mr. Bogmans said.
The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.
Countries like Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Argentina have also suffered as their currencies lost value against the dollar, which is used internationally to pay for most food commodities, Mr. Bogmans said.
In Africa, bad weather, pandemic restrictions and conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan have disrupted transportation routes and driven up food prices.
Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.
“Africa is facing record levels of insecurity,” he said.
While shopping at a market in Mexico City’s Juarez neighborhood on Thursday, Gabriela Ramírez Ramírez, a 43-year-old domestic worker, said the increase in prices had strained her monthly budget, about half of which goes to food.
Inflation in Mexico reached its highest rate in more than 20 years in November, before easing slightly in December.
“It affects me a lot because you don’t earn enough, and the raises they give you are very small,” she said. “Sometimes we barely have enough to eat.”
The impact has been less severe in the United States, where food accounts for less than one-seventh of household spending on average, and inflation has become broad-based, spilling into energy, used cars, dishwashers, services and rents as price increases reach a 40-year high.
Yet American food prices have still risen sharply, putting a burden on the poorest households who spend more of their overall budget on food. Food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Biden administration has tried to restrain some of these increases, including with an effort to combat consolidation in the meat packing business, which it says is a source of higher prices.
On Monday, the Department of Agriculture announced that it was partnering with the Port of Oakland to set up a 25-acre “pop-up” site where empty shipping containers could be filled, to try to speed their shipment out of the country.
But economists say that while these efforts help at the margin, there may be little the government can do to combat a phenomenon that is both complex and global.
The high cost of energy remains a particular challenge, said Mr. Obstfeld, since it increases transport costs for food, drives up the price of fertilizers, which require a lot of energy to produce, and diverts grain into biofuel production, away from people’s diets.
Maria Zieba, assistant vice president of international affairs at the National Pork Producers Council, said pork farmers were confronting a variety of challenges, including shipping container prices that are on average 170 percent higher than a year ago, last-minute cancellations of their shipments, and a lack of trucks and cold storage facilities.
“These are all the things that are adding to the price that you’re seeing at the grocery store,” Ms. Zieba said.
Chris Edgington, a corn and soybean farmer in Northern Iowa who serves as president of the National Corn Growers Association, said farmers were also struggling with rising costs for fertilizer, crop insurance and chemicals.
Much of the corn Mr. Edgington produces is processed into ethanol, leaving a byproduct called distillers grains that is commonly used as animal feed.
Those grains from Mr. Edgington’s farms are typically loaded into a container in Chicago, where they are shipped by rail to the port of Los Angeles, then on to Vietnam or other countries to feed fish, chickens and pigs.
But lately there has been a shortage of containers in Chicago to carry the distillers grains. Overloaded shipping companies have been refusing to send their steel boxes to the Midwest to pick up agricultural products, instead preferring to ship them back to Asia to carry more lucrative cargo.
With both their costs and their sales prices increasing, many farmers are making similar margins to what they earned before, Mr. Edgington said. But “huge swings” in prices were still putting their finances at risk.
“Farmers are going to handle a lot more dollars and have a lot more risk for basically no different return than what we had a few years ago,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/busi ... 778d3e6de3
The prices have climbed to their highest level since 2011, according to a U.N. index. It could cause social unrest “on a widespread scale,” one expert said.
WASHINGTON — Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.
The increases have affected items as varied as grains, vegetable oils, butter, pasta, beef and coffee. They come as farmers around the globe face an array of challenges, including drought and ice storms that have ruined crops, rising prices for fertilizer and fuel, and pandemic-related labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that make it difficult to get products to market.
A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.
Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said that food price increases would strain incomes in poorer countries, especially in some parts of Latin America and Africa, where some people may spend up to 50 or 60 percent of their income on food.
He said that it wasn’t “much of an exaggeration” to say the world was approaching a global food crisis, and that slower growth, high unemployment and stressed budgets from governments that have spent heavily to combat the pandemic had created “a perfect storm of adverse circumstances.”
“There’s a lot of cause for worry about social unrest on a widespread scale,” he added.
Even before the pandemic, global food prices had been trending upward as disease wiped out much of China’s pig herd and the U.S.-China trade war resulted in Chinese tariffs on American agricultural goods.
But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home. Some American farmers who could not get their products into the hands of consumers were forced to dump milk in their fields and cull their herds.
Two years later, global demand for food remains strong, but higher fuel prices and shipping costs, along with other supply chain bottlenecks like a shortage of truck drivers and shipping containers, continue to push up prices, said Christian Bogmans, an economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Drought and bad weather in major agricultural producing countries like Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Russia and Ukraine have worsened the situation.
The I.M.F.’s data shows that average food inflation across the world reached 6.85 percent on an annualized basis in December, the highest level since their series started in 2014. Between April 2020 and December 2021, the price of soybeans soared 52 percent, and corn and wheat both grew 80 percent, the fund’s data showed, while the price of coffee rose 70 percent, due largely to droughts and frost in Brazil.
While food prices appear set to stabilize, events like a conflict in Ukraine, a major producer of wheat and corn, or further adverse weather could change that calculation, Mr. Bogmans said.
The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.
Countries like Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Argentina have also suffered as their currencies lost value against the dollar, which is used internationally to pay for most food commodities, Mr. Bogmans said.
In Africa, bad weather, pandemic restrictions and conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan have disrupted transportation routes and driven up food prices.
Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.
“Africa is facing record levels of insecurity,” he said.
While shopping at a market in Mexico City’s Juarez neighborhood on Thursday, Gabriela Ramírez Ramírez, a 43-year-old domestic worker, said the increase in prices had strained her monthly budget, about half of which goes to food.
Inflation in Mexico reached its highest rate in more than 20 years in November, before easing slightly in December.
“It affects me a lot because you don’t earn enough, and the raises they give you are very small,” she said. “Sometimes we barely have enough to eat.”
The impact has been less severe in the United States, where food accounts for less than one-seventh of household spending on average, and inflation has become broad-based, spilling into energy, used cars, dishwashers, services and rents as price increases reach a 40-year high.
Yet American food prices have still risen sharply, putting a burden on the poorest households who spend more of their overall budget on food. Food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Biden administration has tried to restrain some of these increases, including with an effort to combat consolidation in the meat packing business, which it says is a source of higher prices.
On Monday, the Department of Agriculture announced that it was partnering with the Port of Oakland to set up a 25-acre “pop-up” site where empty shipping containers could be filled, to try to speed their shipment out of the country.
But economists say that while these efforts help at the margin, there may be little the government can do to combat a phenomenon that is both complex and global.
The high cost of energy remains a particular challenge, said Mr. Obstfeld, since it increases transport costs for food, drives up the price of fertilizers, which require a lot of energy to produce, and diverts grain into biofuel production, away from people’s diets.
Maria Zieba, assistant vice president of international affairs at the National Pork Producers Council, said pork farmers were confronting a variety of challenges, including shipping container prices that are on average 170 percent higher than a year ago, last-minute cancellations of their shipments, and a lack of trucks and cold storage facilities.
“These are all the things that are adding to the price that you’re seeing at the grocery store,” Ms. Zieba said.
Chris Edgington, a corn and soybean farmer in Northern Iowa who serves as president of the National Corn Growers Association, said farmers were also struggling with rising costs for fertilizer, crop insurance and chemicals.
Much of the corn Mr. Edgington produces is processed into ethanol, leaving a byproduct called distillers grains that is commonly used as animal feed.
Those grains from Mr. Edgington’s farms are typically loaded into a container in Chicago, where they are shipped by rail to the port of Los Angeles, then on to Vietnam or other countries to feed fish, chickens and pigs.
But lately there has been a shortage of containers in Chicago to carry the distillers grains. Overloaded shipping companies have been refusing to send their steel boxes to the Midwest to pick up agricultural products, instead preferring to ship them back to Asia to carry more lucrative cargo.
With both their costs and their sales prices increasing, many farmers are making similar margins to what they earned before, Mr. Edgington said. But “huge swings” in prices were still putting their finances at risk.
“Farmers are going to handle a lot more dollars and have a lot more risk for basically no different return than what we had a few years ago,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/busi ... 778d3e6de3
Water Supplies From Glaciers May Peak Sooner Than Anticipated
New satellite mapping of the world’s mountain ice suggests Earth’s glaciers may contain less water than previously thought.
The world’s glaciers may contain less water than previously believed, a new study has found, suggesting that freshwater supplies could peak sooner than anticipated for millions of people worldwide who depend on glacial melt for drinking water, crop irrigation and everyday use.
The latest findings are based on satellite images taken during 2017 and 2018. They are a snapshot in time; scientists will need to do more work to connect them with long-term trends. But they imply that further global warming could cause today’s ice to vanish in many places on a shorter timeline than previously thought.
In the tropical Andes, for instance, the study estimated glacier volume to be 27 percent less than the scientific consensus as of a few years ago. In parts of Russia and northern Asia, glacier volume was 35 percent smaller, the study found.
Worldwide, the study found 11 percent less ice in the glaciers than had been estimated earlier. In the high mountains of Asia, however, it found 37 percent more ice, and in Patagonia and the central Andes, 10 percent more.
The new estimates come from a more detailed and realistic digital reconstruction of Earth’s 215,000 glaciers than had been possible before, said Romain Millan, a geophysicist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France, and lead author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Climate Fwd There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it sent to your inbox.
Even so, “we still have lots of uncertainty in some regions,” Dr. Millan said, mostly because of the scarcity of on-the-ground measurements, which help to inform any digital reconstruction. Those regions, including the Andes and the Himalayas, “are the ones where people rely on fresh water coming from glaciers,” he said.
The melting of glaciers is threatening livelihoods and reshaping landscapes in North America, Europe, New Zealand and many places in between.
In the upper Indus basin of the Himalayas, which straddles Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, glacial melt accounts for nearly half of river flow. Yet logistical and political challenges mean scientists can monitor only a small share of the Himalayan glaciers, said Anjal Prakash, a water expert at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad who did not work on the new study.
“It’s a data-deficient region,” Dr. Prakash said. “Countries do not cooperate. They don’t share information with each other.”
With 1.5 billion people benefiting from the water and other resources of the Himalayas, while also facing growing risks of severe floods, the region “is just waiting for a disaster to happen,” Dr. Prakash said.
Satellite images comparing the Laohugou No. 12 glacier in China in September 2018, top, and again in July 2020.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
As glaciers have melted, they have contributed to rising global sea levels. The new study suggests that, all together, they could add 10 inches to the oceans instead of the foot or so that was estimated earlier. Either way, it is small compared with what the melting of Greenland and Antarctica could add to sea levels in the far future if the planet heats to catastrophic levels.
To produce their new estimates of glacier dimensions, Dr. Millan and his colleagues combined more than 811,000 satellite images to clock the speeds at which the glaciers’ surfaces are moving. Glaciers may look like solid, unchanging masses, but in fact, they are constantly in motion: sliding across the terrain; deforming under their own weight; flowing, syrup-like, down valleys. This movement is a clue to the amount of ice that is locked inside.
Depleting water supplies. The world’s glaciers may contain less water than previously believed, suggesting that freshwater supplies could peak sooner than anticipated for millions of people worldwide who depend on glacial melt for drinking water, crop irrigation and everyday use.
Measuring emissions from space. A European satellite reveals sites in the United States, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere that are “ultra emitters” of methane, a potent planet-warming gas. The data could help fight climate change.
Spiking energy prices. World leaders have vowed to scale back the use of fossil fuels to help keep a lid on global warming. But a drastic upheaval in the markets for oil, natural gas and coal, fueled in part by geopolitical turmoil, is complicating the shift toward cleaner sources of energy.
“The thickness of the glacier controls how fast it moves,” said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who did not work on the new study. “And so, vice versa, if you know how fast it moves, you can say something about the thickness.”
The high resolution of the satellite images allowed Dr. Millan and his colleagues to capture fine variations in the glaciers’ thickness, such as narrow troughs in the ground underneath. They could map small ice caps in South America, Europe and New Zealand that had never been mapped before.
In certain ways, scientists understand less about some of the glaciers draped over the world’s mountains than they do about the much larger ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, said Mathieu Morlighem, an earth scientist at Dartmouth College who worked on the new study.
Only a few thousand glaciers worldwide have been measured on-site. In places like North America, the balmier climate means more pockets of water in the glaciers, which can thwart radar measurements. Compared with the giant ice sheets, where fast-moving ice has smoothed the underlying bedrock over time, the terrain beneath mountain glaciers can be “just so complex,” Dr. Morlighem said, making it harder to gauge their dimensions.
“Just 10, 15 years ago, we barely knew the area of the glaciers,” said Regine Hock, a geoscientist at the University of Oslo in Norway who was not involved in the new research. Estimates of glacier volume were “very, very rough,” she said.
Today’s “data revolution” is helping scientists make better predictions about local and regional water resources, even if the big picture globally — that the glaciers will thin substantially during this century — is unlikely to change much, Dr. Hock said. “There is only so much ice,” she said, “and then it’s gone.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/clim ... 778d3e6de3
New satellite mapping of the world’s mountain ice suggests Earth’s glaciers may contain less water than previously thought.
The world’s glaciers may contain less water than previously believed, a new study has found, suggesting that freshwater supplies could peak sooner than anticipated for millions of people worldwide who depend on glacial melt for drinking water, crop irrigation and everyday use.
The latest findings are based on satellite images taken during 2017 and 2018. They are a snapshot in time; scientists will need to do more work to connect them with long-term trends. But they imply that further global warming could cause today’s ice to vanish in many places on a shorter timeline than previously thought.
In the tropical Andes, for instance, the study estimated glacier volume to be 27 percent less than the scientific consensus as of a few years ago. In parts of Russia and northern Asia, glacier volume was 35 percent smaller, the study found.
Worldwide, the study found 11 percent less ice in the glaciers than had been estimated earlier. In the high mountains of Asia, however, it found 37 percent more ice, and in Patagonia and the central Andes, 10 percent more.
The new estimates come from a more detailed and realistic digital reconstruction of Earth’s 215,000 glaciers than had been possible before, said Romain Millan, a geophysicist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France, and lead author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Climate Fwd There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it sent to your inbox.
Even so, “we still have lots of uncertainty in some regions,” Dr. Millan said, mostly because of the scarcity of on-the-ground measurements, which help to inform any digital reconstruction. Those regions, including the Andes and the Himalayas, “are the ones where people rely on fresh water coming from glaciers,” he said.
The melting of glaciers is threatening livelihoods and reshaping landscapes in North America, Europe, New Zealand and many places in between.
In the upper Indus basin of the Himalayas, which straddles Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, glacial melt accounts for nearly half of river flow. Yet logistical and political challenges mean scientists can monitor only a small share of the Himalayan glaciers, said Anjal Prakash, a water expert at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad who did not work on the new study.
“It’s a data-deficient region,” Dr. Prakash said. “Countries do not cooperate. They don’t share information with each other.”
With 1.5 billion people benefiting from the water and other resources of the Himalayas, while also facing growing risks of severe floods, the region “is just waiting for a disaster to happen,” Dr. Prakash said.
Satellite images comparing the Laohugou No. 12 glacier in China in September 2018, top, and again in July 2020.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
As glaciers have melted, they have contributed to rising global sea levels. The new study suggests that, all together, they could add 10 inches to the oceans instead of the foot or so that was estimated earlier. Either way, it is small compared with what the melting of Greenland and Antarctica could add to sea levels in the far future if the planet heats to catastrophic levels.
To produce their new estimates of glacier dimensions, Dr. Millan and his colleagues combined more than 811,000 satellite images to clock the speeds at which the glaciers’ surfaces are moving. Glaciers may look like solid, unchanging masses, but in fact, they are constantly in motion: sliding across the terrain; deforming under their own weight; flowing, syrup-like, down valleys. This movement is a clue to the amount of ice that is locked inside.
Depleting water supplies. The world’s glaciers may contain less water than previously believed, suggesting that freshwater supplies could peak sooner than anticipated for millions of people worldwide who depend on glacial melt for drinking water, crop irrigation and everyday use.
Measuring emissions from space. A European satellite reveals sites in the United States, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere that are “ultra emitters” of methane, a potent planet-warming gas. The data could help fight climate change.
Spiking energy prices. World leaders have vowed to scale back the use of fossil fuels to help keep a lid on global warming. But a drastic upheaval in the markets for oil, natural gas and coal, fueled in part by geopolitical turmoil, is complicating the shift toward cleaner sources of energy.
“The thickness of the glacier controls how fast it moves,” said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who did not work on the new study. “And so, vice versa, if you know how fast it moves, you can say something about the thickness.”
The high resolution of the satellite images allowed Dr. Millan and his colleagues to capture fine variations in the glaciers’ thickness, such as narrow troughs in the ground underneath. They could map small ice caps in South America, Europe and New Zealand that had never been mapped before.
In certain ways, scientists understand less about some of the glaciers draped over the world’s mountains than they do about the much larger ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, said Mathieu Morlighem, an earth scientist at Dartmouth College who worked on the new study.
Only a few thousand glaciers worldwide have been measured on-site. In places like North America, the balmier climate means more pockets of water in the glaciers, which can thwart radar measurements. Compared with the giant ice sheets, where fast-moving ice has smoothed the underlying bedrock over time, the terrain beneath mountain glaciers can be “just so complex,” Dr. Morlighem said, making it harder to gauge their dimensions.
“Just 10, 15 years ago, we barely knew the area of the glaciers,” said Regine Hock, a geoscientist at the University of Oslo in Norway who was not involved in the new research. Estimates of glacier volume were “very, very rough,” she said.
Today’s “data revolution” is helping scientists make better predictions about local and regional water resources, even if the big picture globally — that the glaciers will thin substantially during this century — is unlikely to change much, Dr. Hock said. “There is only so much ice,” she said, “and then it’s gone.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
Yahoo Life
Here’s why you might want to stop washing your jeans: ‘It’s about reducing our impact’
Rachel Sarah
Wed, February 16, 2022, 2:11 PM
Sure, air them out, but please don't wash your jeans, say some including Levi's itself.
In Unearthed, Gen Z climate-change activists discuss some of the most pressing issues facing our planet — and reveal what you can do to help make a real difference.
Sometimes, it can seem like every moment of our day is contributing to the planet's demise — what we eat, where we shop, how we get to the store even working from home in a T-shirt and jeans.
According to Levi Strauss & Company itself, that pair of jeans — from the cotton field to the department store — consumes more than 900 gallons of water during its lifetime. That's enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs.
But the water waste doesn't stop when that denim hits the store shelves. If you wash your jeans regularly in your washing machine, you're using another 19 gallons of water per load — the equivalent of four of those blue office water coolers. If you're washing between five and six loads per week, this can add up to more than 5,000 gallons of water per year.
And that's where you can take control with one simple change: Stop washing your jeans.
'Conserving water starts with us'
This is the tagline for Shreya Ramachandran's nonprofit, the Grey Water Project, which she founded in 2016 as a middle school student in Fremont, Calif. Today, as a freshman at Stanford University, Ramachandran — who has been recognized globally for her hard work, including with the Children's Climate Prize 2019 and as a National Geographic Young Explorer — is on a mission to educate people about how to conserve water.
A rack of second hand jeans
Keep your jeans out of the washing machine. (Photo: Getty Images)
"A lot of people think that what they do won't make a difference," Ramachandran tells Yahoo Life. "They think, 'I'm just one person. What effect will I have?' Well, everybody's actions matter." And not washing your jeans, she agrees, is a good start.
"It requires you to think about it and develop a new habit," explains Ramachandran.
But why must we conserve water, anyway, and where has it all gone?
That's the question Newsha K. Aiami, chief research strategy and development officer for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, is asking.
"Water is an essential resource that we cannot live without," Ajami, who's recognized internationally as a leader in urban water strategy, tells Yahoo Life. "It's about rethinking how we use and reuse water. This is not just about the utilities. It's about what we do in our own homes as well."
A new study found that the mega-drought in the western U.S. is the worst it has been in 1,200 years, with a lead author telling NPR that roughly one-fifth of that current drought — which is shrinking reservoirs, depleting aquifers, lowering rivers and contributing to wildfires — can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
According to Levi's 2025 Water Action Strategy, which aims to save water on the manufacturing end, "By 2030, an estimated 45 cities worldwide (that’s nearly 470 million people) will be categorized as high-stress — which means the demand for water is higher than what’s available."
And so it bears repeating, say activists, to focus on what you can control. "It's about reducing our impact," Ajami says, meaning, for example, by being aware about how much water you use every day. "Water consumption should be at the heart of every discussion we're having because water is a limited resource," Ajami says. "The less we use, the less we pollute and the more we can leave for our ecosystem to survive."
Annie Mills, a young entrepreneur in the U.K. who received a Circular Economy Award for her final year projects, including one about how to save water, tells Yahoo Life, "I don't think many people know there's an issue, really, with water.”
Mills references an article in The Guardian, "England could run short of water within 25 years," and says that one of the issues is that water is very cheap in many parts of the world, including the United States and Europe. "So," she adds, "saving water is not incentivized."
How you can do your part to save water — and extend the life of your jeans while you're at it
Fortunately, Ajami says, today's new washing machines are designed specifically to be high-efficient because they don't use as much water. (Energy Star states that, on average, one if its certified washers uses 14 gallons of water per load, while a standard washing machine uses 20 gallons of water per load.)
“Say, if you go to Best Buy, they'll sell you a high efficiency washing machine," Ajami explains. "So, that transition has happened. But when it comes to grey water reuse, this hasn't happened yet." Grey water, Ramachandran says, is “lightly used water from sinks, showers, baths, and laundries," which (as long as you don't use borax or boron) can be reused to water lawns and plants. "Using environmentally friendly soaps and detergents when you're reusing grey water is super important," says Ramachandran.
But back to those beloved jeans: They are particularly suited to hold a bit of grime, so letting them go for a while is an easy way to cut back on water usage.
In fact, Chip Bergh, president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., told ABC News a while back even he has gone a full year without washing his personal Levi's, noting that doing so not only saves water, but gives his denim the gift of longevity. “And, when my jeans really need a wash, I do it the old fashioned way: I hand-wash them and hang-dry them,” he noted on the Levi's website. “Ask my wife – I really do."
While not everyone is on board with never washing those dungarees (especially when they start to stink — although a classic study found the bacteria level remained the same for 15 months), there are plenty of suggestions out there about how to care for them instead of constant washings — whether it's spritzing them with a natural fabric freshener, hand-washing in cold water and hanging to dry, airing out by storing them on a hook instead of in a drawer, or decreasing washings to just twice a year. Finally, consider buying second-hand jeans instead of new ones, which will help you not support the water-wasting manufacturing process at the start of a pair's life, too.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00794.html
Here’s why you might want to stop washing your jeans: ‘It’s about reducing our impact’
Rachel Sarah
Wed, February 16, 2022, 2:11 PM
Sure, air them out, but please don't wash your jeans, say some including Levi's itself.
In Unearthed, Gen Z climate-change activists discuss some of the most pressing issues facing our planet — and reveal what you can do to help make a real difference.
Sometimes, it can seem like every moment of our day is contributing to the planet's demise — what we eat, where we shop, how we get to the store even working from home in a T-shirt and jeans.
According to Levi Strauss & Company itself, that pair of jeans — from the cotton field to the department store — consumes more than 900 gallons of water during its lifetime. That's enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs.
But the water waste doesn't stop when that denim hits the store shelves. If you wash your jeans regularly in your washing machine, you're using another 19 gallons of water per load — the equivalent of four of those blue office water coolers. If you're washing between five and six loads per week, this can add up to more than 5,000 gallons of water per year.
And that's where you can take control with one simple change: Stop washing your jeans.
'Conserving water starts with us'
This is the tagline for Shreya Ramachandran's nonprofit, the Grey Water Project, which she founded in 2016 as a middle school student in Fremont, Calif. Today, as a freshman at Stanford University, Ramachandran — who has been recognized globally for her hard work, including with the Children's Climate Prize 2019 and as a National Geographic Young Explorer — is on a mission to educate people about how to conserve water.
A rack of second hand jeans
Keep your jeans out of the washing machine. (Photo: Getty Images)
"A lot of people think that what they do won't make a difference," Ramachandran tells Yahoo Life. "They think, 'I'm just one person. What effect will I have?' Well, everybody's actions matter." And not washing your jeans, she agrees, is a good start.
"It requires you to think about it and develop a new habit," explains Ramachandran.
But why must we conserve water, anyway, and where has it all gone?
That's the question Newsha K. Aiami, chief research strategy and development officer for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, is asking.
"Water is an essential resource that we cannot live without," Ajami, who's recognized internationally as a leader in urban water strategy, tells Yahoo Life. "It's about rethinking how we use and reuse water. This is not just about the utilities. It's about what we do in our own homes as well."
A new study found that the mega-drought in the western U.S. is the worst it has been in 1,200 years, with a lead author telling NPR that roughly one-fifth of that current drought — which is shrinking reservoirs, depleting aquifers, lowering rivers and contributing to wildfires — can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
According to Levi's 2025 Water Action Strategy, which aims to save water on the manufacturing end, "By 2030, an estimated 45 cities worldwide (that’s nearly 470 million people) will be categorized as high-stress — which means the demand for water is higher than what’s available."
And so it bears repeating, say activists, to focus on what you can control. "It's about reducing our impact," Ajami says, meaning, for example, by being aware about how much water you use every day. "Water consumption should be at the heart of every discussion we're having because water is a limited resource," Ajami says. "The less we use, the less we pollute and the more we can leave for our ecosystem to survive."
Annie Mills, a young entrepreneur in the U.K. who received a Circular Economy Award for her final year projects, including one about how to save water, tells Yahoo Life, "I don't think many people know there's an issue, really, with water.”
Mills references an article in The Guardian, "England could run short of water within 25 years," and says that one of the issues is that water is very cheap in many parts of the world, including the United States and Europe. "So," she adds, "saving water is not incentivized."
How you can do your part to save water — and extend the life of your jeans while you're at it
Fortunately, Ajami says, today's new washing machines are designed specifically to be high-efficient because they don't use as much water. (Energy Star states that, on average, one if its certified washers uses 14 gallons of water per load, while a standard washing machine uses 20 gallons of water per load.)
“Say, if you go to Best Buy, they'll sell you a high efficiency washing machine," Ajami explains. "So, that transition has happened. But when it comes to grey water reuse, this hasn't happened yet." Grey water, Ramachandran says, is “lightly used water from sinks, showers, baths, and laundries," which (as long as you don't use borax or boron) can be reused to water lawns and plants. "Using environmentally friendly soaps and detergents when you're reusing grey water is super important," says Ramachandran.
But back to those beloved jeans: They are particularly suited to hold a bit of grime, so letting them go for a while is an easy way to cut back on water usage.
In fact, Chip Bergh, president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., told ABC News a while back even he has gone a full year without washing his personal Levi's, noting that doing so not only saves water, but gives his denim the gift of longevity. “And, when my jeans really need a wash, I do it the old fashioned way: I hand-wash them and hang-dry them,” he noted on the Levi's website. “Ask my wife – I really do."
While not everyone is on board with never washing those dungarees (especially when they start to stink — although a classic study found the bacteria level remained the same for 15 months), there are plenty of suggestions out there about how to care for them instead of constant washings — whether it's spritzing them with a natural fabric freshener, hand-washing in cold water and hanging to dry, airing out by storing them on a hook instead of in a drawer, or decreasing washings to just twice a year. Finally, consider buying second-hand jeans instead of new ones, which will help you not support the water-wasting manufacturing process at the start of a pair's life, too.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00794.html
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
A water solution
Hi Karim,
I don’t have to tell you there is a lot of bad news these days. Including, that the world is running out of fresh water, and it’s getting harder and harder to grow food in many places.
But there’s also really good news. We can save water, in a huge way — by changing what we eat — and get healthier at the same time!
The future could be a whole lot brighter.
Get the whole water story, and find out how you can be part of the solution on planet Earth, right here https://foodrevolution.org/blog/food-an ... griculture .
Yours for making a difference,
Ocean Robbins
Hi Karim,
I don’t have to tell you there is a lot of bad news these days. Including, that the world is running out of fresh water, and it’s getting harder and harder to grow food in many places.
But there’s also really good news. We can save water, in a huge way — by changing what we eat — and get healthier at the same time!
The future could be a whole lot brighter.
Get the whole water story, and find out how you can be part of the solution on planet Earth, right here https://foodrevolution.org/blog/food-an ... griculture .
Yours for making a difference,
Ocean Robbins
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
What the War in Ukraine Means for the World’s Food Supply
By Michael J. Puma and Megan Konar
Dr. Puma is the director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University’s Climate School, where he has done extensive research on global food security. Dr. Konar is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois, where she studies food supply chains and their links to water use and sustainability.
As we watch Ukrainian refugees arrive by car and foot in Poland, it’s hard not to recall World War II, when the region was ravaged by fighting, famine spread and millions of Ukrainians died of starvation.
We’re nowhere near that point; this time, however, food disruptions won’t remain an insular crisis. What is happening in Ukraine now already is radiating outward and threatening food availability in less prosperous nations that have come to depend on exports of grains and other food products from Ukraine and Russia.
The Black Sea region today is a vital hub of global agricultural production and trade, and Ukraine is one of the world’s breadbaskets. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia were net grain importers. Now the two countries account for 29 percent of global exports of wheat. They also contribute 19 percent of global corn and 80 percent of global sunflower oil exports.
After only days of fighting, global commodity markets have been roiled. Shipping in the Sea of Azov was brought to a standstill last week. Wheat futures jumped 12 percent on the Chicago Board of Trade. This increase topped already inflated prices.
Staple grains supply the bulk of the diet for the world’s poorest. Higher prices threaten to place a significant strain on poor countries like Bangladesh, Sudan and Pakistan, which in 2020 received roughly half or more of their wheat from Russia or Ukraine, as well as Egypt and Turkey, which imported the great majority of their wheat from those combatants. Nations in the Middle East and North Africa saw food prices spike in 2010 when Ukraine restricted its exports of wheat, squeezing what had been consistent supplies of food to those countries and contributing to political instability throughout the region.
Pandemic-related supply chain disruptions have already inflated prices for food and other basic staples. Many low-income food-importing countries have also seen an increase in malnourishment rates.
To make matters worse, Russia and Belarus, a staging ground for the invasion and close ally of Russia, are also major exporters of fertilizer, with Russia leading the world; prices, which were at historically high levels before the war, have spiked. Fertilizer scarcity jeopardizes global crop production at a time when some or all of the 13 percent of global corn and 12 percent of global wheat exports from Ukraine could be lost.
The United Nations’ World Food Program warned in November that the world is facing “catastrophic hunger” for hundreds of millions of people as the humanitarian organization struggles financially to provide help to troubled nations. This is especially true in Afghanistan, where famine looms for millions.
“Fuel costs are up, food prices are soaring, fertilizer is more expensive, and all of this feeds into new crises,” the program’s executive director, David Beasley, said at the time.
Now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has significantly exacerbated those problems, threatening the security of countries already struggling to feed their populations.
The international community must take steps to forestall the accelerating food crisis rippling outward from Ukraine. Countries — including the United States, Canada, France and Australia — should avoid restricting grain exports and work to ensure that trade contributes to global food availability. Nations that rely on Ukraine and Russia for their grain should work with other grain producers to diversify their agricultural supply chains. Sanctions against Russia should be carefully evaluated to ensure that they do not exacerbate food shortages in vulnerable countries.
International efforts to reduce fertilizer prices, by holding down energy prices and maintaining open trade in fertilizers, would help farmers around the world grow crops. Food prices have been high not only because of the pandemic but also because palm and soybean oils have been redirected for biodiesel fuel in the European Union, for instance, and corn for ethanol in the United States. Diverting grain from those uses to food supplies could help to lower prices by replacing losses in supply from Ukraine and Russia. It is also clear that, given the World Food Program’s financial challenges, new strategies are needed for financing humanitarian assistance.
Food security is essential for a nation’s security. Throughout history, we have seen conflict disrupt food supplies and, even more troubling, turn food into a weapon of war. Prioritizing food security for countries that depend on Ukraine and Russia is vital. NATO and its allies must stabilize supplies and assure that humanitarian efforts protect Ukrainians.
Global integration and development since World War II have dramatically reduced famine around the world, but conflict remains a main driver of hunger and supply disruptions that can upend the security of nations. The international community should act now to keep food prices down and ensure that grain supplies reach vulnerable countries. We must take action to prevent hunger and famine from being used in the 21st century as a weapon of war in Ukraine and elsewhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Michael J. Puma and Megan Konar
Dr. Puma is the director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University’s Climate School, where he has done extensive research on global food security. Dr. Konar is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois, where she studies food supply chains and their links to water use and sustainability.
As we watch Ukrainian refugees arrive by car and foot in Poland, it’s hard not to recall World War II, when the region was ravaged by fighting, famine spread and millions of Ukrainians died of starvation.
We’re nowhere near that point; this time, however, food disruptions won’t remain an insular crisis. What is happening in Ukraine now already is radiating outward and threatening food availability in less prosperous nations that have come to depend on exports of grains and other food products from Ukraine and Russia.
The Black Sea region today is a vital hub of global agricultural production and trade, and Ukraine is one of the world’s breadbaskets. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia were net grain importers. Now the two countries account for 29 percent of global exports of wheat. They also contribute 19 percent of global corn and 80 percent of global sunflower oil exports.
After only days of fighting, global commodity markets have been roiled. Shipping in the Sea of Azov was brought to a standstill last week. Wheat futures jumped 12 percent on the Chicago Board of Trade. This increase topped already inflated prices.
Staple grains supply the bulk of the diet for the world’s poorest. Higher prices threaten to place a significant strain on poor countries like Bangladesh, Sudan and Pakistan, which in 2020 received roughly half or more of their wheat from Russia or Ukraine, as well as Egypt and Turkey, which imported the great majority of their wheat from those combatants. Nations in the Middle East and North Africa saw food prices spike in 2010 when Ukraine restricted its exports of wheat, squeezing what had been consistent supplies of food to those countries and contributing to political instability throughout the region.
Pandemic-related supply chain disruptions have already inflated prices for food and other basic staples. Many low-income food-importing countries have also seen an increase in malnourishment rates.
To make matters worse, Russia and Belarus, a staging ground for the invasion and close ally of Russia, are also major exporters of fertilizer, with Russia leading the world; prices, which were at historically high levels before the war, have spiked. Fertilizer scarcity jeopardizes global crop production at a time when some or all of the 13 percent of global corn and 12 percent of global wheat exports from Ukraine could be lost.
The United Nations’ World Food Program warned in November that the world is facing “catastrophic hunger” for hundreds of millions of people as the humanitarian organization struggles financially to provide help to troubled nations. This is especially true in Afghanistan, where famine looms for millions.
“Fuel costs are up, food prices are soaring, fertilizer is more expensive, and all of this feeds into new crises,” the program’s executive director, David Beasley, said at the time.
Now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has significantly exacerbated those problems, threatening the security of countries already struggling to feed their populations.
The international community must take steps to forestall the accelerating food crisis rippling outward from Ukraine. Countries — including the United States, Canada, France and Australia — should avoid restricting grain exports and work to ensure that trade contributes to global food availability. Nations that rely on Ukraine and Russia for their grain should work with other grain producers to diversify their agricultural supply chains. Sanctions against Russia should be carefully evaluated to ensure that they do not exacerbate food shortages in vulnerable countries.
International efforts to reduce fertilizer prices, by holding down energy prices and maintaining open trade in fertilizers, would help farmers around the world grow crops. Food prices have been high not only because of the pandemic but also because palm and soybean oils have been redirected for biodiesel fuel in the European Union, for instance, and corn for ethanol in the United States. Diverting grain from those uses to food supplies could help to lower prices by replacing losses in supply from Ukraine and Russia. It is also clear that, given the World Food Program’s financial challenges, new strategies are needed for financing humanitarian assistance.
Food security is essential for a nation’s security. Throughout history, we have seen conflict disrupt food supplies and, even more troubling, turn food into a weapon of war. Prioritizing food security for countries that depend on Ukraine and Russia is vital. NATO and its allies must stabilize supplies and assure that humanitarian efforts protect Ukrainians.
Global integration and development since World War II have dramatically reduced famine around the world, but conflict remains a main driver of hunger and supply disruptions that can upend the security of nations. The international community should act now to keep food prices down and ensure that grain supplies reach vulnerable countries. We must take action to prevent hunger and famine from being used in the 21st century as a weapon of war in Ukraine and elsewhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
A 3-year famine?!
Not sure if this has to do because of anyone’s sins this time but…
Karim Maherali, are you familiar with the Biblical story found in the Book of 1 Kings where for 3 years straight, no rain fell in the land of Samaria, plus no food?
Well, this one looks pretty bad too…
And they’re saying it’s going to last for a while…
Like maybe something permanent…
Experts grimly warn us of an unprecedented disaster of biblical proportions.
Will you survive?
>> Grab This Life-Saving Report https://www.waterrevolutionguide.net/index_v2.html
THIS is no joke, you’ll find the REAL answers inside.
PLUS: You’ll also receive an extremely useful bonus that will become more valuable than gold in a crisis.
IMPORTANT: 3 little-known secrets any serious patriot must know to survive the upcoming disaster!
>> Check it out HERE https://www.waterrevolutionguide.net/index_v2.html
United in Christ,
The Christ Revealed Team
Not sure if this has to do because of anyone’s sins this time but…
Karim Maherali, are you familiar with the Biblical story found in the Book of 1 Kings where for 3 years straight, no rain fell in the land of Samaria, plus no food?
Well, this one looks pretty bad too…
And they’re saying it’s going to last for a while…
Like maybe something permanent…
Experts grimly warn us of an unprecedented disaster of biblical proportions.
Will you survive?
>> Grab This Life-Saving Report https://www.waterrevolutionguide.net/index_v2.html
THIS is no joke, you’ll find the REAL answers inside.
PLUS: You’ll also receive an extremely useful bonus that will become more valuable than gold in a crisis.
IMPORTANT: 3 little-known secrets any serious patriot must know to survive the upcoming disaster!
>> Check it out HERE https://www.waterrevolutionguide.net/index_v2.html
United in Christ,
The Christ Revealed Team
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
Ukraine War Threatens to Cause a Global Food Crisis
Farmers harvesting wheat last year near the village of Tbilisskaya, Russia. A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war.Credit...Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press
The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.
A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent and some fertilizers by 40 percent.
The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.
Now economists, aid organizations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.
The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalization. Prices for food, fertilizer, oil, gas and even metals like aluminum, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.
“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”
Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.
Farmers unloading a harvest of barley in February in Preobrazhenka, Ukraine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world’s dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.
Around the world, the result will be even higher grocery bills. In February, U.S. grocery prices were already up 8.6 percent over a year prior, the largest increase in 40 years, according to government data. Economists expect the war to further inflate those prices.
For those living on the brink of food insecurity, the latest surge in prices could push many over the edge. After remaining mostly flat for five years, hunger rose by about 18 percent during the pandemic to between 720 million and 811 million people. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the war’s impact on the global food market alone could cause an additional 7.6 million to 13.1 million people to go hungry.
The World Food Program’s costs have already increased by $71 million a month, enough to cut daily rations for 3.8 million people. “We’ll be taking food from the hungry to give to the starving,” Mr. Beasley said.
Rising prices and hunger also present a potential new dimension to the world’s view of the war. Could they further fuel anger at Russia and calls for intervention? Or would frustration be targeted at the Western sanctions that are helping to trap food and fertilizer?
While virtually every country will face higher prices, some places could struggle to find enough food at all.
Armenia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have imported virtually all of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine and must find new sources. But they are competing against much larger buyers, including Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh and Iran, which have obtained more than 60 percent of their wheat from the two warring countries.
And all of them will be bidding on an even smaller supply because China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of wheat, is expected to buy much more than usual on world markets this year. On March 5, China revealed that severe flooding last year had delayed the planting of a third of the country’s wheat crop, and now the upcoming harvest looks bleak.
A farmer harvesting a wheat crop last year in Hebei Province, China.Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters
“This year’s seedling situation can be said to be the worst in history,” said China’s agriculture minister, Tang Renjian.
Rising food prices have long been a catalyst for social and political upheavals in poor African and Arab countries, and many subsidize staples like bread in efforts to avoid such problems. But their economies and budgets — already strained by the pandemic and high energy costs — are now at risk of buckling under the cost of food, economists said.
Tunisia struggled to pay for some food imports before the war and now is trying to prevent an economic collapse. Inflation has already set off protests in Morocco and is helping stir renewed unrest and violent crackdowns in Sudan.
“A lot of people think that this is just going to mean that their bagels are going to become more expensive. And that’s absolutely true, but that’s not what this is about,” said Ben Isaacson, a longtime agriculture analyst with Scotiabank. Since the 1970s, North Africa and the Middle East have grappled with repeated uprisings. “What actually led to people going into the streets and protesting?” he said. “It starts from food shortages and from food price inflation.”
Countries afflicted by protracted conflict, including Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and Ethiopia, are already facing severe hunger emergencies that experts fear could quickly worsen.
In Afghanistan, aid workers warn that the humanitarian crisis has already been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, making it more difficult to feed the roughly 23 million Afghans — more than half the population — who do not have enough to eat.
Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, the director of Bashir Navid Complex, an Afghan imports company, said that prices were rising across the board. It took him five days in Russia this month to find cooking oil. He bought 15-liter cartons for $30 each and will sell them at the Afghan market for $35. Before the war, he sold them for $23.
“The United States thinks it has only sanctioned Russia and its banks,” he said. “But the United States has sanctioned the whole world.”
Laborers unloading sacks of flour from a World Food Program convoy in Afghanistan last year.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
For the global food market, there are few worse countries to be in conflict than Russia and Ukraine. Over the past five years, they have together accounted for nearly 30 percent of the exports of the world’s wheat, 17 percent of corn, 32 percent of barley, a crucial source of animal feed, and 75 percent of sunflower seed oil, an important cooking oil in some parts of the world.
Assault on Mariupol broadens. Russian forces continued to bombard the besieged coastal city and have forcibly deported thousands of residents, according to local officials. Among the freshly devastated was an art school, where about 400 residents were hiding, city officials said.
Signs of a stalemate take shape. With Russia’s advance on Ukraine’s major cities stalled and satellite imagery showing soldiers digging into defensive positions around Kyiv, a consensus is emerging in the West that the war has reached a bloody stalemate.
A Ukrainian base is hit. A missile attack on barracks in the southern city of Mykolaiv killed more than 40 marines, a Ukrainian official said. That would make it one of the single deadliest attacks on Ukrainian forces since the start of the war, and the death toll could be much higher than reported.
Chernobyl workers are relieved. After more than three weeks without being able to leave the nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, officials said. Staff at the plant have been trapped since Feb. 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site.
Russia has largely been unable to export food because of sanctions that have effectively cut it off financially. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been cut off physically. Russia has blocked the Black Sea for exports, and Ukraine lacks enough rail cars to transport food overland.
What is now becoming more worrisome is the next harvest, particularly in Ukraine. On March 11, Ukraine’s agriculture minister begged allies for 1,900 rail cars of fuel, saying that the country’s farms had run out after supplies were diverted to the military. Without that fuel, he said, Ukrainian farmers would be unable to plant or harvest.
There are other hurdles. The United Nations estimated that up to 30 percent of Ukrainian farmland could become a war zone. And with millions of Ukrainians fleeing the country or joining the front lines, far fewer can work the fields.
Russian and Ukrainian wheat is not easily replaced. Inventories are already tight in the United States and Canada, according to the United Nations, while Argentina is limiting exports and Australia is already at full shipping capacity. Over the past year, wheat prices are up 69 percent. Among other major food exports of Russia and Ukraine, corn prices are up 36 percent and barley 82 percent.
The war also threatens another longer-term shock to the food markets: a shortage of fertilizer.
Matt Huie, a farmer near Corpus Christi, Texas, said that skyrocketing prices had already forced him to stop applying fertilizer to the grazing fields that nourish his hundreds of cows, assuring that they will be skinnier come slaughter. Now he is worried he will have to also reduce fertilizer for his next corn crop, which would slash its yield. “We’ve gotten into uncharted territory,” he said.
Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter, providing about 15 percent of the world supply. This month, just as farmers around the world prepared for planting, Russia told its fertilizer producers to halt exports. Sanctions already were making such transactions difficult.
Sanctions also have hit Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, a leading producer of potash-based fertilizer, critical for many major crops including soybeans and corn. But even before the Ukraine war, Belarus’s fertilizer exports were blocked because of sanctions over its seizure of an expatriate dissident who had been a passenger in a Ryanair jetliner forced to land in the country.
In another ominous signal to fertilizer customers, earlier this month European fertilizer producers said they were slowing or halting production because of soaring energy prices. Many fertilizers are made with natural gas.
The world’s major fertilizers have now more than doubled or tripled in price over the past year.
Brazil, the world’s largest producer of soybeans, purchases nearly half its potash fertilizer from Russia and Belarus. It now has just three months of stockpiles left. The national soybean farmers association has instructed members to use less fertilizer, if any, this season. Brazil’s soybean crop, already diminished by a severe drought, is now likely to be even smaller.
A tractor loading fertilizer before spreading it in a soybean field last month near Brasília.Credit...Adriano Machado/Reuters
“They’re preventing fertilizers from getting to producing countries,” said Antonio Galvan, the soybean association’s president, criticizing international sanctions. “How many millions are going starve to death because of the lack of these fertilizers?”
Brazil sells most of its soybeans to China, which uses much of the crop to feed livestock. Fewer, more expensive soybeans could force ranchers to cut back on such animal feed, meaning smaller cows, pigs and chickens — and higher prices for meat.
Jon Bakehouse, a corn and soybean farmer in Hastings, Iowa, said he prepaid for fertilizer late last year because he worried about a looming shortage.
His fertilizer still has not arrived, and he now has less than a month to apply it to his corn crop. Without it, he said, his yields would be halved.
“You know when they show the cars jumping in slow motion and the passengers inside are up in the air? That’s what it feels like,” he said. “We’re all just kind of suspended in the air, waiting for the car to land. Who knows if it’s going to be a nice, gentle landing, or if it’s going to be a nosedive into the ditch.”
Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher from Beijing; André Spigariol from Brasília; Najim Rahim from Houston; and Safiullah Padshah from Kabul, Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Farmers harvesting wheat last year near the village of Tbilisskaya, Russia. A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war.Credit...Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press
The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.
A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent and some fertilizers by 40 percent.
The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.
Now economists, aid organizations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.
The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalization. Prices for food, fertilizer, oil, gas and even metals like aluminum, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.
“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”
Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.
Farmers unloading a harvest of barley in February in Preobrazhenka, Ukraine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world’s dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.
Around the world, the result will be even higher grocery bills. In February, U.S. grocery prices were already up 8.6 percent over a year prior, the largest increase in 40 years, according to government data. Economists expect the war to further inflate those prices.
For those living on the brink of food insecurity, the latest surge in prices could push many over the edge. After remaining mostly flat for five years, hunger rose by about 18 percent during the pandemic to between 720 million and 811 million people. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the war’s impact on the global food market alone could cause an additional 7.6 million to 13.1 million people to go hungry.
The World Food Program’s costs have already increased by $71 million a month, enough to cut daily rations for 3.8 million people. “We’ll be taking food from the hungry to give to the starving,” Mr. Beasley said.
Rising prices and hunger also present a potential new dimension to the world’s view of the war. Could they further fuel anger at Russia and calls for intervention? Or would frustration be targeted at the Western sanctions that are helping to trap food and fertilizer?
While virtually every country will face higher prices, some places could struggle to find enough food at all.
Armenia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have imported virtually all of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine and must find new sources. But they are competing against much larger buyers, including Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh and Iran, which have obtained more than 60 percent of their wheat from the two warring countries.
And all of them will be bidding on an even smaller supply because China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of wheat, is expected to buy much more than usual on world markets this year. On March 5, China revealed that severe flooding last year had delayed the planting of a third of the country’s wheat crop, and now the upcoming harvest looks bleak.
A farmer harvesting a wheat crop last year in Hebei Province, China.Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters
“This year’s seedling situation can be said to be the worst in history,” said China’s agriculture minister, Tang Renjian.
Rising food prices have long been a catalyst for social and political upheavals in poor African and Arab countries, and many subsidize staples like bread in efforts to avoid such problems. But their economies and budgets — already strained by the pandemic and high energy costs — are now at risk of buckling under the cost of food, economists said.
Tunisia struggled to pay for some food imports before the war and now is trying to prevent an economic collapse. Inflation has already set off protests in Morocco and is helping stir renewed unrest and violent crackdowns in Sudan.
“A lot of people think that this is just going to mean that their bagels are going to become more expensive. And that’s absolutely true, but that’s not what this is about,” said Ben Isaacson, a longtime agriculture analyst with Scotiabank. Since the 1970s, North Africa and the Middle East have grappled with repeated uprisings. “What actually led to people going into the streets and protesting?” he said. “It starts from food shortages and from food price inflation.”
Countries afflicted by protracted conflict, including Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and Ethiopia, are already facing severe hunger emergencies that experts fear could quickly worsen.
In Afghanistan, aid workers warn that the humanitarian crisis has already been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, making it more difficult to feed the roughly 23 million Afghans — more than half the population — who do not have enough to eat.
Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, the director of Bashir Navid Complex, an Afghan imports company, said that prices were rising across the board. It took him five days in Russia this month to find cooking oil. He bought 15-liter cartons for $30 each and will sell them at the Afghan market for $35. Before the war, he sold them for $23.
“The United States thinks it has only sanctioned Russia and its banks,” he said. “But the United States has sanctioned the whole world.”
Laborers unloading sacks of flour from a World Food Program convoy in Afghanistan last year.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
For the global food market, there are few worse countries to be in conflict than Russia and Ukraine. Over the past five years, they have together accounted for nearly 30 percent of the exports of the world’s wheat, 17 percent of corn, 32 percent of barley, a crucial source of animal feed, and 75 percent of sunflower seed oil, an important cooking oil in some parts of the world.
Assault on Mariupol broadens. Russian forces continued to bombard the besieged coastal city and have forcibly deported thousands of residents, according to local officials. Among the freshly devastated was an art school, where about 400 residents were hiding, city officials said.
Signs of a stalemate take shape. With Russia’s advance on Ukraine’s major cities stalled and satellite imagery showing soldiers digging into defensive positions around Kyiv, a consensus is emerging in the West that the war has reached a bloody stalemate.
A Ukrainian base is hit. A missile attack on barracks in the southern city of Mykolaiv killed more than 40 marines, a Ukrainian official said. That would make it one of the single deadliest attacks on Ukrainian forces since the start of the war, and the death toll could be much higher than reported.
Chernobyl workers are relieved. After more than three weeks without being able to leave the nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, officials said. Staff at the plant have been trapped since Feb. 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site.
Russia has largely been unable to export food because of sanctions that have effectively cut it off financially. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been cut off physically. Russia has blocked the Black Sea for exports, and Ukraine lacks enough rail cars to transport food overland.
What is now becoming more worrisome is the next harvest, particularly in Ukraine. On March 11, Ukraine’s agriculture minister begged allies for 1,900 rail cars of fuel, saying that the country’s farms had run out after supplies were diverted to the military. Without that fuel, he said, Ukrainian farmers would be unable to plant or harvest.
There are other hurdles. The United Nations estimated that up to 30 percent of Ukrainian farmland could become a war zone. And with millions of Ukrainians fleeing the country or joining the front lines, far fewer can work the fields.
Russian and Ukrainian wheat is not easily replaced. Inventories are already tight in the United States and Canada, according to the United Nations, while Argentina is limiting exports and Australia is already at full shipping capacity. Over the past year, wheat prices are up 69 percent. Among other major food exports of Russia and Ukraine, corn prices are up 36 percent and barley 82 percent.
The war also threatens another longer-term shock to the food markets: a shortage of fertilizer.
Matt Huie, a farmer near Corpus Christi, Texas, said that skyrocketing prices had already forced him to stop applying fertilizer to the grazing fields that nourish his hundreds of cows, assuring that they will be skinnier come slaughter. Now he is worried he will have to also reduce fertilizer for his next corn crop, which would slash its yield. “We’ve gotten into uncharted territory,” he said.
Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter, providing about 15 percent of the world supply. This month, just as farmers around the world prepared for planting, Russia told its fertilizer producers to halt exports. Sanctions already were making such transactions difficult.
Sanctions also have hit Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, a leading producer of potash-based fertilizer, critical for many major crops including soybeans and corn. But even before the Ukraine war, Belarus’s fertilizer exports were blocked because of sanctions over its seizure of an expatriate dissident who had been a passenger in a Ryanair jetliner forced to land in the country.
In another ominous signal to fertilizer customers, earlier this month European fertilizer producers said they were slowing or halting production because of soaring energy prices. Many fertilizers are made with natural gas.
The world’s major fertilizers have now more than doubled or tripled in price over the past year.
Brazil, the world’s largest producer of soybeans, purchases nearly half its potash fertilizer from Russia and Belarus. It now has just three months of stockpiles left. The national soybean farmers association has instructed members to use less fertilizer, if any, this season. Brazil’s soybean crop, already diminished by a severe drought, is now likely to be even smaller.
A tractor loading fertilizer before spreading it in a soybean field last month near Brasília.Credit...Adriano Machado/Reuters
“They’re preventing fertilizers from getting to producing countries,” said Antonio Galvan, the soybean association’s president, criticizing international sanctions. “How many millions are going starve to death because of the lack of these fertilizers?”
Brazil sells most of its soybeans to China, which uses much of the crop to feed livestock. Fewer, more expensive soybeans could force ranchers to cut back on such animal feed, meaning smaller cows, pigs and chickens — and higher prices for meat.
Jon Bakehouse, a corn and soybean farmer in Hastings, Iowa, said he prepaid for fertilizer late last year because he worried about a looming shortage.
His fertilizer still has not arrived, and he now has less than a month to apply it to his corn crop. Without it, he said, his yields would be halved.
“You know when they show the cars jumping in slow motion and the passengers inside are up in the air? That’s what it feels like,” he said. “We’re all just kind of suspended in the air, waiting for the car to land. Who knows if it’s going to be a nice, gentle landing, or if it’s going to be a nosedive into the ditch.”
Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher from Beijing; André Spigariol from Brasília; Najim Rahim from Houston; and Safiullah Padshah from Kabul, Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
War in Ukraine Compounds Hunger in East Africa
The conflict has driven up the cost of food in a region that depends heavily on crops from Russia and Ukraine and is facing what could be its worst drought in four decades.
NAIROBI, Kenya — First came the drought, drying up rivers, and claiming the lives of two of Ruqiya Hussein Ahmed’s children as her family fled the barren countryside in southwest Somalia.
Then came the war in Ukraine, pushing food prices so high that even after making it to the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu, she is struggling to keep her two other children alive.
“Even here, we have nothing,” she said.
Across East Africa, below-average rainfall has created some of the driest conditions in four decades, according to the United Nations, leaving more than 13 million people facing severe hunger. Seasonal harvests have hit their lowest in decades, malnourished children are filling hospitals and many families are walking long distances to find help.
The devastating drought has blanketed most of Somalia, leaving nearly a third of the population hungry. In neighboring Kenya, the drought has left more than three million people short of food and killed more than 1.5 million livestock.
And in Ethiopia, where a civil war has impeded aid delivery into the northern Tigray region, food insecurity is more widespread than at any time in the last six years. The first food aid to Tigray in three months arrived on Friday.
Now, the war in Ukraine is making the crisis even worse by raising the price of grains, fuel and fertilizer.
Russia and Ukraine are some of the region’s top suppliers of agricultural commodities such as wheat, soybeans and barley. At least 14 African countries import half of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Eritrea depends on them entirely for its wheat imports.
“The conflict in Ukraine is compounding an already complicated situation in East Africa,” Gabriela Bucher, the executive director for the charity organization Oxfam International, said in a phone interview. “East Africa is not on the global agenda now, but the region needs the solidarity of the international community and it needs it now.”
The devastating drought and the war in Ukraine are amplified by a series of crises over the past two years.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted food supply chains and forced many families to pay higher prices for food staples. The locust infestation in Kenya, the civil war in Ethiopia, extreme flooding in South Sudan, the political crises and growing terrorist attacks in Somalia, and the intensifying ethnic conflict in Sudan have all contributed to the destruction of farms, the depletion of harvests and a worsening food crisis, aid groups say.
The war in Ukraine, which is in its second month, is expected to cause further spikes in food costs across the region. The conflict, depending on how long it lasts, could reduce “the quantity and quality” of staples like wheat, said Sean Granville-Ross, the regional director for Africa at Mercy Corps, a nongovernmental organization.
“Meeting the basic needs of vulnerable drought-affected populations will become more expensive and challenging,” he said.
That ominous outcome is already evident in many parts of the region.
In Somalia, the price of a 20-liter container of cooking oil has increased to $55 from $32, while 25 kilograms of beans now go for $28 instead of $18, according to data gathered by Mercy Corps.
In Sudan, the price of bread has nearly doubled, and some bakeries have closed because wheat imports have dropped by 60 percent since the beginning of the war, according to Elsadig Elnour, the Sudan country director for the charity organization Islamic Relief.
Kenya, citing the war in Ukraine, also raised the price of fuel, leading to protests in parts of the country.
When famine hits, children are particularly vulnerable. An estimated 5.5 million children in the region are facing high levels of malnutrition from the drought, according to World Vision, a Christian aid organization.
“My children died of hunger. They suffered,” said Ms. Ahmed, whose children, aged 3 and 4, died during her days-long trek from her home in Adde Ali village in the Lower Shabelle region to the outskirts of Mogadishu. “They died under a tree.”
In Mogadishu, families are already feeling the ripple effects of the war in Ukraine, with rising food prices squeezing household budgets as the holy month of Ramadan approaches. With no job, proper shelter or access to the beans, maize and tomatoes she once farmed, Ms. Ahmed now relies on food donations from well-wishers to feed her two surviving children, ages 7 and 9.
And aid programs are stretched thin. The war has affected the operations of the World Food Program, which this month said it had reduced rations for refugees and others in East Africa and the Middle East because of rising costs and depleting funds.
Bodies of giraffes in Sabuli Wildlife Conservancy in Wajir County, Kenya in December. The giraffes, weak from lack of food and water, died after getting stuck in mud as they tried to drink from a nearly dried up reservoir nearby.Credit...Getty Images
Some fear that the continued drought in East Africa could come to resemble the one in 2011, which killed about 260,000 people in Somalia alone. While the situation hasn’t reached that level yet, the funding and resources needed to avert such a crisis have not yet begun to flow, Ms. Bucher of Oxfam said.
Just 3 percent of the $6 billion the U.N. needs this year for Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan has been allocated, she said, while Kenya has only secured 11 percent of the $139 million needed for assistance.
Last week, the African Development Bank said it would raise up to $1 billion to improve agricultural production and help Africans become self-sufficient in food in the long run. But while these initiatives are welcome, Ms. Bucher said it was imperative that donors also give unsparingly and immediately to avert a much wider crisis.
“The world needs to come to the rescue of East Africa to avert a catastrophe,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The conflict has driven up the cost of food in a region that depends heavily on crops from Russia and Ukraine and is facing what could be its worst drought in four decades.
NAIROBI, Kenya — First came the drought, drying up rivers, and claiming the lives of two of Ruqiya Hussein Ahmed’s children as her family fled the barren countryside in southwest Somalia.
Then came the war in Ukraine, pushing food prices so high that even after making it to the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu, she is struggling to keep her two other children alive.
“Even here, we have nothing,” she said.
Across East Africa, below-average rainfall has created some of the driest conditions in four decades, according to the United Nations, leaving more than 13 million people facing severe hunger. Seasonal harvests have hit their lowest in decades, malnourished children are filling hospitals and many families are walking long distances to find help.
The devastating drought has blanketed most of Somalia, leaving nearly a third of the population hungry. In neighboring Kenya, the drought has left more than three million people short of food and killed more than 1.5 million livestock.
And in Ethiopia, where a civil war has impeded aid delivery into the northern Tigray region, food insecurity is more widespread than at any time in the last six years. The first food aid to Tigray in three months arrived on Friday.
Now, the war in Ukraine is making the crisis even worse by raising the price of grains, fuel and fertilizer.
Russia and Ukraine are some of the region’s top suppliers of agricultural commodities such as wheat, soybeans and barley. At least 14 African countries import half of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Eritrea depends on them entirely for its wheat imports.
“The conflict in Ukraine is compounding an already complicated situation in East Africa,” Gabriela Bucher, the executive director for the charity organization Oxfam International, said in a phone interview. “East Africa is not on the global agenda now, but the region needs the solidarity of the international community and it needs it now.”
The devastating drought and the war in Ukraine are amplified by a series of crises over the past two years.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted food supply chains and forced many families to pay higher prices for food staples. The locust infestation in Kenya, the civil war in Ethiopia, extreme flooding in South Sudan, the political crises and growing terrorist attacks in Somalia, and the intensifying ethnic conflict in Sudan have all contributed to the destruction of farms, the depletion of harvests and a worsening food crisis, aid groups say.
The war in Ukraine, which is in its second month, is expected to cause further spikes in food costs across the region. The conflict, depending on how long it lasts, could reduce “the quantity and quality” of staples like wheat, said Sean Granville-Ross, the regional director for Africa at Mercy Corps, a nongovernmental organization.
“Meeting the basic needs of vulnerable drought-affected populations will become more expensive and challenging,” he said.
That ominous outcome is already evident in many parts of the region.
In Somalia, the price of a 20-liter container of cooking oil has increased to $55 from $32, while 25 kilograms of beans now go for $28 instead of $18, according to data gathered by Mercy Corps.
In Sudan, the price of bread has nearly doubled, and some bakeries have closed because wheat imports have dropped by 60 percent since the beginning of the war, according to Elsadig Elnour, the Sudan country director for the charity organization Islamic Relief.
Kenya, citing the war in Ukraine, also raised the price of fuel, leading to protests in parts of the country.
When famine hits, children are particularly vulnerable. An estimated 5.5 million children in the region are facing high levels of malnutrition from the drought, according to World Vision, a Christian aid organization.
“My children died of hunger. They suffered,” said Ms. Ahmed, whose children, aged 3 and 4, died during her days-long trek from her home in Adde Ali village in the Lower Shabelle region to the outskirts of Mogadishu. “They died under a tree.”
In Mogadishu, families are already feeling the ripple effects of the war in Ukraine, with rising food prices squeezing household budgets as the holy month of Ramadan approaches. With no job, proper shelter or access to the beans, maize and tomatoes she once farmed, Ms. Ahmed now relies on food donations from well-wishers to feed her two surviving children, ages 7 and 9.
And aid programs are stretched thin. The war has affected the operations of the World Food Program, which this month said it had reduced rations for refugees and others in East Africa and the Middle East because of rising costs and depleting funds.
Bodies of giraffes in Sabuli Wildlife Conservancy in Wajir County, Kenya in December. The giraffes, weak from lack of food and water, died after getting stuck in mud as they tried to drink from a nearly dried up reservoir nearby.Credit...Getty Images
Some fear that the continued drought in East Africa could come to resemble the one in 2011, which killed about 260,000 people in Somalia alone. While the situation hasn’t reached that level yet, the funding and resources needed to avert such a crisis have not yet begun to flow, Ms. Bucher of Oxfam said.
Just 3 percent of the $6 billion the U.N. needs this year for Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan has been allocated, she said, while Kenya has only secured 11 percent of the $139 million needed for assistance.
Last week, the African Development Bank said it would raise up to $1 billion to improve agricultural production and help Africans become self-sufficient in food in the long run. But while these initiatives are welcome, Ms. Bucher said it was imperative that donors also give unsparingly and immediately to avert a much wider crisis.
“The world needs to come to the rescue of East Africa to avert a catastrophe,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS
Putin’s War Has Started a Global Food Crisis
By Sara Menker and Rajiv Shah
Ms. Menker is the founder of Gro Intelligence, an artificial-intelligence company that forecasts global agricultural markets and the impacts of climate change. Mr. Shah is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The humanitarian disaster produced by Russia’s needless invasion of Ukraine shocks the conscience: 10 million Ukrainians displaced and innumerable Ukrainians killed. But because Ukraine and Russia are both major food exporters, the human toll will grow much larger, far from Ukraine’s borders.
As Ukraine’s farms have turned into battlefields, uncertainty around the country’s agricultural exports, as well as Russia’s, has created a global food emergency by driving up the prices of wheat, corn, soybeans, fertilizers and sunflower oil.
The prices of commodities like wheat and corn are global, but their shocks are inequitable. Wealthier countries and people can absorb sharp price increases. Meanwhile, people in poorer countries, like Sudan and Afghanistan, are finding it far more expensive to eat. In Sudan, rising wheat prices have caused the price of bread to roughly double. Because Ukraine and Russia exported livestock feed and fertilizer before the war, the cost and difficulty of producing food will increase in the months and years ahead.
By tracking price increases of the foods that each nation imports, along with modeling countries’ import needs, we can estimate which countries are most likely to struggle to fill the gap left by domestic shortfalls and feed their people over the coming months. In addition to Sudan and Afghanistan, Egypt is in for a difficult year. The country is the world’s largest importer of wheat, which is 33 percent more expensive than it was at the end of last year.
Unfortunately, many of these countries are facing other crises. Social safety nets have been worn thin by Covid-19. Oil prices remain high. And over half of low-income countries are in or at high risk of debt distress as interest rates rise, limiting their ability to borrow money to pay for food.
Before the war, roughly 811 million people around the world did not have enough to eat. That number could increase tremendously this hunger season, the time between spring planting and fall harvest when food often runs out.
Climate change will compound these risks. In key agricultural regions, drought conditions are worse today than they’ve been in decades.
The war’s many implications are distressing. Food crises often lead to social unrest, conflict, failed governments and mass migrations. For example, some researchers point to rising food prices as a driver of the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011.
But history, especially food price crises around 2008 and 2010, reminds us that by using the latest data and science, the world can mount a comprehensive response to hunger.
First, nations and institutions must move quickly to save lives. That starts with fully funding the World Food Program and leveraging existing food reserves to help countries in distress. The United Nations, the World Trade Organization and others must also work with countries to prevent food export bans, which are already undermining the global food supply.
Second, the Group of 7 and China must lead a new round of emergency relief from official debt to enable vulnerable countries to respond to hunger. Debt relief was a boon to development in the early 2000s and could free up resources today. Multilateral financing institutions must also take aggressive action, using emergency instruments like a reallocation of International Monetary Fund special drawing rights, which can augment countries’ official currency reserves.
Third, over the long term, the world must help make vulnerable economies more food secure. The U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, established in 2010 with bipartisan support, has helped transform agriculture in Africa and elsewhere. New investments in similar food systems’ transformation, especially in regenerative agriculture, could make nations more resilient to energy, climate, health and geopolitical shocks.
With a comprehensive strategy, the world can limit the scope of the war’s hunger emergency. At a time of conflict and climate change, it will also begin the long-overdue process of making a more stable, sustainable global food system that can nourish everyone in a crisis-laden era.
Graphs and maps at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Sara Menker and Rajiv Shah
Ms. Menker is the founder of Gro Intelligence, an artificial-intelligence company that forecasts global agricultural markets and the impacts of climate change. Mr. Shah is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The humanitarian disaster produced by Russia’s needless invasion of Ukraine shocks the conscience: 10 million Ukrainians displaced and innumerable Ukrainians killed. But because Ukraine and Russia are both major food exporters, the human toll will grow much larger, far from Ukraine’s borders.
As Ukraine’s farms have turned into battlefields, uncertainty around the country’s agricultural exports, as well as Russia’s, has created a global food emergency by driving up the prices of wheat, corn, soybeans, fertilizers and sunflower oil.
The prices of commodities like wheat and corn are global, but their shocks are inequitable. Wealthier countries and people can absorb sharp price increases. Meanwhile, people in poorer countries, like Sudan and Afghanistan, are finding it far more expensive to eat. In Sudan, rising wheat prices have caused the price of bread to roughly double. Because Ukraine and Russia exported livestock feed and fertilizer before the war, the cost and difficulty of producing food will increase in the months and years ahead.
By tracking price increases of the foods that each nation imports, along with modeling countries’ import needs, we can estimate which countries are most likely to struggle to fill the gap left by domestic shortfalls and feed their people over the coming months. In addition to Sudan and Afghanistan, Egypt is in for a difficult year. The country is the world’s largest importer of wheat, which is 33 percent more expensive than it was at the end of last year.
Unfortunately, many of these countries are facing other crises. Social safety nets have been worn thin by Covid-19. Oil prices remain high. And over half of low-income countries are in or at high risk of debt distress as interest rates rise, limiting their ability to borrow money to pay for food.
Before the war, roughly 811 million people around the world did not have enough to eat. That number could increase tremendously this hunger season, the time between spring planting and fall harvest when food often runs out.
Climate change will compound these risks. In key agricultural regions, drought conditions are worse today than they’ve been in decades.
The war’s many implications are distressing. Food crises often lead to social unrest, conflict, failed governments and mass migrations. For example, some researchers point to rising food prices as a driver of the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011.
But history, especially food price crises around 2008 and 2010, reminds us that by using the latest data and science, the world can mount a comprehensive response to hunger.
First, nations and institutions must move quickly to save lives. That starts with fully funding the World Food Program and leveraging existing food reserves to help countries in distress. The United Nations, the World Trade Organization and others must also work with countries to prevent food export bans, which are already undermining the global food supply.
Second, the Group of 7 and China must lead a new round of emergency relief from official debt to enable vulnerable countries to respond to hunger. Debt relief was a boon to development in the early 2000s and could free up resources today. Multilateral financing institutions must also take aggressive action, using emergency instruments like a reallocation of International Monetary Fund special drawing rights, which can augment countries’ official currency reserves.
Third, over the long term, the world must help make vulnerable economies more food secure. The U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, established in 2010 with bipartisan support, has helped transform agriculture in Africa and elsewhere. New investments in similar food systems’ transformation, especially in regenerative agriculture, could make nations more resilient to energy, climate, health and geopolitical shocks.
With a comprehensive strategy, the world can limit the scope of the war’s hunger emergency. At a time of conflict and climate change, it will also begin the long-overdue process of making a more stable, sustainable global food system that can nourish everyone in a crisis-laden era.
Graphs and maps at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Governments Tighten Grip on Global Food Stocks, Sending Prices Higher
Dozens of countries have thrown up trade barriers in the past two months to protect scarce supplies of food and commodities, but experts say the policies will only exacerbate a global food crisis.
WASHINGTON — Ukraine has limited exports of sunflower oil, wheat, oats and cattle in an attempt to protect its war-torn economy. Russia has banned sales of fertilizer, sugar and grains to other nations.
Indonesia, which produces more than half the world’s palm oil, has halted outgoing shipments. Turkey has stopped exports of butter, beef, lamb, goats, maize and vegetable oils.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a new wave of protectionism as governments, desperate to secure food and other commodities for their citizens amid shortages and rising prices, erect new barriers to stop exports at their borders.
The measures are often well intended. But like the panic-buying that stripped grocery store shelves at various moments of the pandemic, the current wave of protectionism will only compound the problems that governments are trying to mitigate, trade experts warn.
Export restrictions are making grains, oils, meat and fertilizer — already at record prices — more expensive and even harder to come by. That is placing an even greater burden on the world’s poor, who are paying an ever-larger share of their income for food, increasing the risk of social unrest in poorer countries struggling with food insecurity.
Since the beginning of the year, countries have imposed a total of 47 export curbs on food and fertilizers — with 43 of those put in place since the invasion of Ukraine in late February, according to tracking by Simon Evenett, a professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen.
“Before the invasion, there’s a very small number of attempts to try and restrict exports of food and fertilizers,” Mr. Evenett said. “After the invasion you see a huge uptick.”
The cascade of new trade barriers comes as the war in Ukraine, and the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, are further straining supply chains that were already in disarray from the pandemic. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, pig iron, nickel and natural gas, and a major supplier of coal, crude oil and fertilizer. Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflower seed oil and a significant exporter of wheat, pig iron, maize and barley.
With countries facing severe threats to supplies of basic goods, many policymakers have quickly dropped the language of open markets and begun advocating a more protective approach. Recommendations range from creating secure supply chains for certain critical materials in friendly countries to blocking exports and “reshoring” foreign factories, bringing operations back to their home countries.
In a speech last week, Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said the pandemic and the war had revealed that American supply chains, while efficient, were neither secure nor resilient. While cautioning against “a fully protectionist direction,” she said the United States should work to reorient its trade relationships toward a large group of “trusted partners,” even if it meant somewhat higher costs for businesses and consumers.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a speech on Wednesday that the war had “justifiably” added to questions about economic interdependence. But she urged countries not to draw the wrong conclusions about the global trading system, saying it had helped drive global growth and provided countries with important goods even during the pandemic.
“While it is true that global supply chains can be prone to disruptions, trade is also a source of resilience,” she said.
The W.T.O. has argued against export bans since the early days of the pandemic, when countries including the United States began throwing up restrictions on exporting masks and medical goods and removed them only gradually.
Now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a similar wave of bans focused on food. “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” Mr. Evenett said.
Protectionist measures have cascaded from country to country in a manner that is particularly evident when it comes to wheat. Russia and Ukraine export more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, feeding billions of people in the form of bread, pasta and packaged foods.
Mr. Evenett said the current wave of trade barriers on wheat had begun as the war’s protagonists, Russia and Belarus, clamped down on exports. The countries that lie along a major trading route for Ukrainian wheat, including Moldova, Serbia and Hungary, then began restricting their wheat exports. Finally, major importers with food security concerns, like Lebanon, Algeria and Egypt, put their own bans into effect.
Mr. Evenett said the dynamic was “still unfolding” and likely to get worse in the months to come. Ukraine’s summer growing season for wheat is being disrupted as fighting keeps farmers away from their fields and pulls workers off to war. And grocery stores in Spain, Greece and Britain are already introducing restrictions on the amount of cereals or oil people can buy.
“We’re already feeling the pinch in Europe of limited supplies of these key crops,” he said.
Several other consequential export bans on food are unrelated to the war, but they will still play into the global dynamic of rising prices.
A palm oil processing plant in Indonesia’s Riau Province. The country has halted outgoing shipments of palm oil, a key ingredient in packaged food.Credit...Kemal Jufri for The New York Times
China began ordering its firms to stop selling fertilizer to other countries last summer, in order to preserve supplies at home, Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Yilin Wang, a research analyst at the institute, wrote in a recent blog post. Now that Russia has also cut off exports of fertilizer, China’s ban will be even more harmful.
“China’s decision to take fertilizer supplies off world markets to ensure its own food security only pushes the problem onto others,” they wrote, adding that “China’s ongoing export restrictions could hardly come at a worse time.”
Indonesia’s restrictions on palm oil, a key ingredient in packaged foods, detergent and cosmetics, are in line with similar bans the country placed on exporting the product before the war in an attempt to keep the price of oil affordable for Indonesian households.
Those measures will add to skyrocketing prices for vegetable oils, driven by a disruption in the supply from Ukraine, the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil.
Governments that put these restrictions in place often argue that their duty is to put the needs of their own citizens first, and the W.T.O.’s rules allow countries to impose temporary measures for national security or safety. But the measures can easily backfire, helping to push up global prices further.
Price increases for food have been felt particularly keenly in poorer countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, which depend on imported food.
Rising concerns. Russia’s invasion on Ukraine has had a ripple effect across the globe, adding to the stock market’s woes. The conflict has already caused dizzying spikes in energy prices and is causing Europe to raise its military spending.
The cost of energy. Oil prices already were the highest since 2014, and they have continued to rise since the invasion. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, so more price increases are inevitable.
Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders worry that Moscow could cut flows in response to the region’s support of Ukraine.
Food prices. Russia is the world’s largest supplier of wheat; together, it and Ukraine account for nearly a quarter of total global exports. Countries like Egypt, which relies heavily on Russian wheat imports, are already looking for alternative suppliers.
Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.
Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctions intended to restrict Russia’s access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.
In a blog post on Thursday, Abebe Aemro Selassie, the director of the International Monetary Fund’s African Department, and Peter Kovacs, an economist in the department, wrote that sub-Saharan Africa was facing a severe shock from rising food and fuel prices that would slow economic growth, sink governments into debt and erode standards of living.
Food accounts for about 40 percent of consumer spending in sub-Saharan Africa, they said, and around 85 percent of the region’s wheat supplies are imported.
International organizations have pledged to increase their support for emergency food supplies and other aid, but the scale of the problem is daunting.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala said she was urging the trade group’s members to refrain from restricting exports and to share any buffer stocks of food, to try to keep prices from soaring. She said that fewer than 10 percent of W.T.O. members had imposed export restrictions and that she had made clear to members that such bans would only compound current problems.
“I’m very concerned about the pending food crisis and steps we need to take,” she told a group of journalists in Washington on Tuesday.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, who recently visited Brazil, a major agricultural exporter, said President Jair Bolsonaro had expressed concerns about Brazil’s ability to obtain fertilizer, which typically comes from the Black Sea region.
Bags of fertilizer at the port in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Since the beginning of the year, countries have imposed a total of 47 export curbs on food and fertilizers.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
She said she had pressed Mr. Bolsonaro about whether Brazil had additional vegetable oil or grains that it could offer on global markets. Mr. Bolsonaro told her that the country’s crops were already under contract, but said Brazil would try to produce more next season, she said.
A prolonged war, or the addition of new sanctions, could cause prices to rise further. But even absent those trends, the factors that have pushed up prices may be hard to unwind.
In a report on Tuesday, the World Bank said the war in Ukraine had altered trade patterns in ways that would keep commodity prices higher through the end of 2024.
Countries have begun seeking out other sources of certain goods — for example, purchasing more costly coal from farther-flung nations like Colombia and the United States — to avoid buying from Russia.
And many of the price increases are interrelated. Higher energy costs are increasing the price of fertilizer, which is produced with natural gas. That in turn is pushing up agricultural prices as crops become more expensive to plant. Rising prices for wheat are also pushing up the price of rice, as people seek out alternatives.
The World Bank estimated that prices of non-energy goods, like agricultural products and metals, would increase almost 20 percent this year before moderating in following years, while wheat prices are expected to rise more than 40 percent to reach a high this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/busi ... 778d3e6de3
WASHINGTON — Ukraine has limited exports of sunflower oil, wheat, oats and cattle in an attempt to protect its war-torn economy. Russia has banned sales of fertilizer, sugar and grains to other nations.
Indonesia, which produces more than half the world’s palm oil, has halted outgoing shipments. Turkey has stopped exports of butter, beef, lamb, goats, maize and vegetable oils.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a new wave of protectionism as governments, desperate to secure food and other commodities for their citizens amid shortages and rising prices, erect new barriers to stop exports at their borders.
The measures are often well intended. But like the panic-buying that stripped grocery store shelves at various moments of the pandemic, the current wave of protectionism will only compound the problems that governments are trying to mitigate, trade experts warn.
Export restrictions are making grains, oils, meat and fertilizer — already at record prices — more expensive and even harder to come by. That is placing an even greater burden on the world’s poor, who are paying an ever-larger share of their income for food, increasing the risk of social unrest in poorer countries struggling with food insecurity.
Since the beginning of the year, countries have imposed a total of 47 export curbs on food and fertilizers — with 43 of those put in place since the invasion of Ukraine in late February, according to tracking by Simon Evenett, a professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen.
“Before the invasion, there’s a very small number of attempts to try and restrict exports of food and fertilizers,” Mr. Evenett said. “After the invasion you see a huge uptick.”
The cascade of new trade barriers comes as the war in Ukraine, and the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, are further straining supply chains that were already in disarray from the pandemic. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, pig iron, nickel and natural gas, and a major supplier of coal, crude oil and fertilizer. Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflower seed oil and a significant exporter of wheat, pig iron, maize and barley.
With countries facing severe threats to supplies of basic goods, many policymakers have quickly dropped the language of open markets and begun advocating a more protective approach. Recommendations range from creating secure supply chains for certain critical materials in friendly countries to blocking exports and “reshoring” foreign factories, bringing operations back to their home countries.
In a speech last week, Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said the pandemic and the war had revealed that American supply chains, while efficient, were neither secure nor resilient. While cautioning against “a fully protectionist direction,” she said the United States should work to reorient its trade relationships toward a large group of “trusted partners,” even if it meant somewhat higher costs for businesses and consumers.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a speech on Wednesday that the war had “justifiably” added to questions about economic interdependence. But she urged countries not to draw the wrong conclusions about the global trading system, saying it had helped drive global growth and provided countries with important goods even during the pandemic.
“While it is true that global supply chains can be prone to disruptions, trade is also a source of resilience,” she said.
The W.T.O. has argued against export bans since the early days of the pandemic, when countries including the United States began throwing up restrictions on exporting masks and medical goods and removed them only gradually.
Now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a similar wave of bans focused on food. “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” Mr. Evenett said.
Protectionist measures have cascaded from country to country in a manner that is particularly evident when it comes to wheat. Russia and Ukraine export more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, feeding billions of people in the form of bread, pasta and packaged foods.
Mr. Evenett said the current wave of trade barriers on wheat had begun as the war’s protagonists, Russia and Belarus, clamped down on exports. The countries that lie along a major trading route for Ukrainian wheat, including Moldova, Serbia and Hungary, then began restricting their wheat exports. Finally, major importers with food security concerns, like Lebanon, Algeria and Egypt, put their own bans into effect.
Mr. Evenett said the dynamic was “still unfolding” and likely to get worse in the months to come. Ukraine’s summer growing season for wheat is being disrupted as fighting keeps farmers away from their fields and pulls workers off to war. And grocery stores in Spain, Greece and Britain are already introducing restrictions on the amount of cereals or oil people can buy.
“We’re already feeling the pinch in Europe of limited supplies of these key crops,” he said.
Several other consequential export bans on food are unrelated to the war, but they will still play into the global dynamic of rising prices.
A palm oil processing plant in Indonesia’s Riau Province. The country has halted outgoing shipments of palm oil, a key ingredient in packaged food.Credit...Kemal Jufri for The New York Times
China began ordering its firms to stop selling fertilizer to other countries last summer, in order to preserve supplies at home, Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Yilin Wang, a research analyst at the institute, wrote in a recent blog post. Now that Russia has also cut off exports of fertilizer, China’s ban will be even more harmful.
“China’s decision to take fertilizer supplies off world markets to ensure its own food security only pushes the problem onto others,” they wrote, adding that “China’s ongoing export restrictions could hardly come at a worse time.”
Indonesia’s restrictions on palm oil, a key ingredient in packaged foods, detergent and cosmetics, are in line with similar bans the country placed on exporting the product before the war in an attempt to keep the price of oil affordable for Indonesian households.
Those measures will add to skyrocketing prices for vegetable oils, driven by a disruption in the supply from Ukraine, the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil.
Governments that put these restrictions in place often argue that their duty is to put the needs of their own citizens first, and the W.T.O.’s rules allow countries to impose temporary measures for national security or safety. But the measures can easily backfire, helping to push up global prices further.
Price increases for food have been felt particularly keenly in poorer countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, which depend on imported food.
Rising concerns. Russia’s invasion on Ukraine has had a ripple effect across the globe, adding to the stock market’s woes. The conflict has already caused dizzying spikes in energy prices and is causing Europe to raise its military spending.
The cost of energy. Oil prices already were the highest since 2014, and they have continued to rise since the invasion. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, so more price increases are inevitable.
Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders worry that Moscow could cut flows in response to the region’s support of Ukraine.
Food prices. Russia is the world’s largest supplier of wheat; together, it and Ukraine account for nearly a quarter of total global exports. Countries like Egypt, which relies heavily on Russian wheat imports, are already looking for alternative suppliers.
Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.
Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctions intended to restrict Russia’s access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.
In a blog post on Thursday, Abebe Aemro Selassie, the director of the International Monetary Fund’s African Department, and Peter Kovacs, an economist in the department, wrote that sub-Saharan Africa was facing a severe shock from rising food and fuel prices that would slow economic growth, sink governments into debt and erode standards of living.
Food accounts for about 40 percent of consumer spending in sub-Saharan Africa, they said, and around 85 percent of the region’s wheat supplies are imported.
International organizations have pledged to increase their support for emergency food supplies and other aid, but the scale of the problem is daunting.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala said she was urging the trade group’s members to refrain from restricting exports and to share any buffer stocks of food, to try to keep prices from soaring. She said that fewer than 10 percent of W.T.O. members had imposed export restrictions and that she had made clear to members that such bans would only compound current problems.
“I’m very concerned about the pending food crisis and steps we need to take,” she told a group of journalists in Washington on Tuesday.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, who recently visited Brazil, a major agricultural exporter, said President Jair Bolsonaro had expressed concerns about Brazil’s ability to obtain fertilizer, which typically comes from the Black Sea region.
Bags of fertilizer at the port in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Since the beginning of the year, countries have imposed a total of 47 export curbs on food and fertilizers.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
She said she had pressed Mr. Bolsonaro about whether Brazil had additional vegetable oil or grains that it could offer on global markets. Mr. Bolsonaro told her that the country’s crops were already under contract, but said Brazil would try to produce more next season, she said.
A prolonged war, or the addition of new sanctions, could cause prices to rise further. But even absent those trends, the factors that have pushed up prices may be hard to unwind.
In a report on Tuesday, the World Bank said the war in Ukraine had altered trade patterns in ways that would keep commodity prices higher through the end of 2024.
Countries have begun seeking out other sources of certain goods — for example, purchasing more costly coal from farther-flung nations like Colombia and the United States — to avoid buying from Russia.
And many of the price increases are interrelated. Higher energy costs are increasing the price of fertilizer, which is produced with natural gas. That in turn is pushing up agricultural prices as crops become more expensive to plant. Rising prices for wheat are also pushing up the price of rice, as people seek out alternatives.
The World Bank estimated that prices of non-energy goods, like agricultural products and metals, would increase almost 20 percent this year before moderating in following years, while wheat prices are expected to rise more than 40 percent to reach a high this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/busi ... 778d3e6de3
Sunflower Oil ‘Vanishes’ as Ukraine War Grinds On
Several British supermarkets have joined other chains around the world in asking shoppers to limit their cooking oil purchases, as supplies dwindle and prices rise.
Global cooking oil shortages, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, have led to purchase restrictions in Ashford, England.Credit...Steve Parsons/Press Association, via Associated Press
First the coronavirus, then the war. Just as the pandemic caused shortages of essential items, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted important food supplies, driving up prices of staples like cooking oil in supermarkets around the world.
Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil. The conflict has now paralyzed harvests and left many nations with limited stocks of edible oil and soaring prices for what’s left — worsening a food crisis in East Africa and leading to export restrictions in Indonesia. Some shoppers, most recently in Britain, are being limited in their purchases of cooking oils, as supermarkets and restaurants adjust to the climbing costs.
“Supply chains, already disrupted by Covid-19, have been further complicated by the war in Ukraine, which is causing shortages in some ingredients like sunflower oil and raising the price of substitute ingredients,” said Kate Halliwell, the chief scientific officer of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents Britain’s largest manufacturing sector.
“Manufacturers are doing all they can to keep costs down, but inevitably some will have to be passed to consumers,” she said.
Tom Holder, a British Retail Consortium spokesman, said retailers have imposed limits on customers after the war disrupted supplies.
Supermarket chains in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and other nations have limited cooking oil purchases, sometimes describing the moves as precautions in the face of increased demand, according to local news outlets. At Tescos, a major British chain, customers can buy up to three bottles of edible oil, “so that everyone can get what they need,” as a flyer posted on a shelf says.
A field of sunflowers next to an oil refinery near the city of Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are the world’s top exporters of sunflower oil.Credit...Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Global cooking oil shortages, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, have led to purchase restrictions in Ashford, England.Credit...Steve Parsons/Press Association, via Associated Press
First the coronavirus, then the war. Just as the pandemic caused shortages of essential items, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted important food supplies, driving up prices of staples like cooking oil in supermarkets around the world.
Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil. The conflict has now paralyzed harvests and left many nations with limited stocks of edible oil and soaring prices for what’s left — worsening a food crisis in East Africa and leading to export restrictions in Indonesia. Some shoppers, most recently in Britain, are being limited in their purchases of cooking oils, as supermarkets and restaurants adjust to the climbing costs.
“Supply chains, already disrupted by Covid-19, have been further complicated by the war in Ukraine, which is causing shortages in some ingredients like sunflower oil and raising the price of substitute ingredients,” said Kate Halliwell, the chief scientific officer of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents Britain’s largest manufacturing sector.
“Manufacturers are doing all they can to keep costs down, but inevitably some will have to be passed to consumers,” she said.
Tom Holder, a British Retail Consortium spokesman, said retailers have imposed limits on customers after the war disrupted supplies.
Supermarket chains in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and other nations have limited cooking oil purchases, sometimes describing the moves as precautions in the face of increased demand, according to local news outlets. At Tescos, a major British chain, customers can buy up to three bottles of edible oil, “so that everyone can get what they need,” as a flyer posted on a shelf says.
A field of sunflowers next to an oil refinery near the city of Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are the world’s top exporters of sunflower oil.Credit...Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/worl ... 778d3e6de3
War and Weather Sent Food Prices Soaring. Now, China’s Harvest Is Uncertain.
Ukraine’s wheat exports have been mostly halted since Russia’s invasion, while drought has damaged crops in India and the United States. China’s upcoming harvest is another concern.
Making dumplings in Shanghai earlier this year. Global wheat prices have risen nearly 80 percent since July.Credit...Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
PINGGU, China — From village to village, the wheat crops in China have been inconsistent this season.
One field on the flat plains east of Beijing was patchy, with knee-high emerald stalks in some spots while almost bald elsewhere, damaged by the torrential rains of last autumn. The next village over, a luxurious wheat crop was thriving after this spring’s bright sunshine and slow, soaking rains.
China’s winter wheat harvest next month is one of the big uncertainties in a global economy already struggling with high commodity prices, particularly in regions heavily dependent on crops from Russia and Ukraine. If the Chinese harvest is bad in the coming weeks, it could drive food prices up further, compounding hunger and poverty in the world’s poorest countries.
Global food prices have already climbed sharply, with wheat up nearly 80 percent since July.
It has been a perfect storm of war and weather.
A damaged wheat warehouse in Novovorontsovka, Ukraine, last week.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images
Russia’s invasion, including a blockade of ports, has disrupted supplies from Ukraine, a leading grain exporter long known as Europe’s breadbasket. The United Nations World Food Program called last week for the immediate reopening of Ukrainian ports, “before the current global hunger crisis spins out of control.”
Energy prices have been rising since before the war, prompting many fertilizer producers to slow or close their factories. As fertilizer costs soar, many farmers around the world are using less, contributing to smaller harvests.
Poor weather has added to the challenges. It has been scorchingly hot this spring in India, a large wheat exporter, while drought has hurt the crops in the southern Great Plains of the United States and in East Africa.
It has been a double blow for East African nations, including Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, which are heavily dependent on Russia and Ukraine for the bulk of their wheat imports. Bread prices have doubled in some areas. The World Food Program warned last Friday, “44 million people around the world are marching toward starvation.”
Sacks of donated wheat being distributed in Ethiopia last year. East Africa depends heavily on Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports.Credit...Amanuel Sileshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of wheat, is the next pressure point for prices.
Deluges last autumn left the soil so waterlogged that the wheat could not easily take root, said Ren Ruixia, a 45-year-old farmhand, as she surveyed a wheat field that looked like it had a bad haircut. Coronavirus lockdowns also delayed the arrival of fertilizer, she said.
“Right now, it seems that the harvest is definitely affected,” Ms. Ren said in late April. “But it also depends on the weather next month — how much rain we have.”
The adequacy of food supplies has long been a top issue in China, where tens of millions of people died of famine in the early 1960s during Mao’s disastrous agricultural experiments. Stringently enforced rules require that a large share of the country’s acreage — 463,000 square miles, larger than Texas — be farmed. Rural villages are sometimes bulldozed to maintain the national target for acres under cultivation.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has made food security a paramount focus, notably when commodities became a trade issue with the United States during the Trump administration.
Agricultural fertilizer at the port of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, in February, before the Russian invasion. As fertilizer costs soar, many farmers around the world are using less.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
“In the future, the demand for food will continue to increase, and the balance between supply and demand will become tighter and tighter,” he warned in a policy speech published March 31 in Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal. “In addition, the international situation is complicated and severe, and we must always be on high alert to ensure food security.”
China’s agriculture minister, Tang Renjian, stirred international concern in early March when he said the wheat crop would be the worst on record because of the deluge last fall. Other agriculture ministry officials have issued warnings, although not quite as downbeat.
Western experts analyzing satellite photos of the Chinese crop have generally been less worried than Chinese officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated last month that China’s wheat crop would be 3 percent smaller than last year’s.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a disaster, but I don’t think it is a normal crop, either,” said Darin Friedrichs, a founder and market research director at Sitonia Consulting, a Shanghai commodities analysis firm.
Top Chinese officials have issued pessimistic warnings in the past, notably in 2011, to make sure lower-level officials pay close attention to the harvest. A global food shortage may be making Chinese officials especially cautious this year.
A wheat field in Shandong Province, China, in February. The United States estimates that China’s wheat crop will be 3 percent smaller this year.Credit...Guo Xulei/Xinhua via Getty Images
China has a sizable stockpile of wheat for emergencies. But some of the wheat may be fit only for animal consumption given the poor storage, said Joseph W. Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/busi ... 778d3e6de3
Making dumplings in Shanghai earlier this year. Global wheat prices have risen nearly 80 percent since July.Credit...Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
PINGGU, China — From village to village, the wheat crops in China have been inconsistent this season.
One field on the flat plains east of Beijing was patchy, with knee-high emerald stalks in some spots while almost bald elsewhere, damaged by the torrential rains of last autumn. The next village over, a luxurious wheat crop was thriving after this spring’s bright sunshine and slow, soaking rains.
China’s winter wheat harvest next month is one of the big uncertainties in a global economy already struggling with high commodity prices, particularly in regions heavily dependent on crops from Russia and Ukraine. If the Chinese harvest is bad in the coming weeks, it could drive food prices up further, compounding hunger and poverty in the world’s poorest countries.
Global food prices have already climbed sharply, with wheat up nearly 80 percent since July.
It has been a perfect storm of war and weather.
A damaged wheat warehouse in Novovorontsovka, Ukraine, last week.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images
Russia’s invasion, including a blockade of ports, has disrupted supplies from Ukraine, a leading grain exporter long known as Europe’s breadbasket. The United Nations World Food Program called last week for the immediate reopening of Ukrainian ports, “before the current global hunger crisis spins out of control.”
Energy prices have been rising since before the war, prompting many fertilizer producers to slow or close their factories. As fertilizer costs soar, many farmers around the world are using less, contributing to smaller harvests.
Poor weather has added to the challenges. It has been scorchingly hot this spring in India, a large wheat exporter, while drought has hurt the crops in the southern Great Plains of the United States and in East Africa.
It has been a double blow for East African nations, including Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, which are heavily dependent on Russia and Ukraine for the bulk of their wheat imports. Bread prices have doubled in some areas. The World Food Program warned last Friday, “44 million people around the world are marching toward starvation.”
Sacks of donated wheat being distributed in Ethiopia last year. East Africa depends heavily on Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports.Credit...Amanuel Sileshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of wheat, is the next pressure point for prices.
Deluges last autumn left the soil so waterlogged that the wheat could not easily take root, said Ren Ruixia, a 45-year-old farmhand, as she surveyed a wheat field that looked like it had a bad haircut. Coronavirus lockdowns also delayed the arrival of fertilizer, she said.
“Right now, it seems that the harvest is definitely affected,” Ms. Ren said in late April. “But it also depends on the weather next month — how much rain we have.”
The adequacy of food supplies has long been a top issue in China, where tens of millions of people died of famine in the early 1960s during Mao’s disastrous agricultural experiments. Stringently enforced rules require that a large share of the country’s acreage — 463,000 square miles, larger than Texas — be farmed. Rural villages are sometimes bulldozed to maintain the national target for acres under cultivation.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has made food security a paramount focus, notably when commodities became a trade issue with the United States during the Trump administration.
Agricultural fertilizer at the port of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, in February, before the Russian invasion. As fertilizer costs soar, many farmers around the world are using less.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
“In the future, the demand for food will continue to increase, and the balance between supply and demand will become tighter and tighter,” he warned in a policy speech published March 31 in Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal. “In addition, the international situation is complicated and severe, and we must always be on high alert to ensure food security.”
China’s agriculture minister, Tang Renjian, stirred international concern in early March when he said the wheat crop would be the worst on record because of the deluge last fall. Other agriculture ministry officials have issued warnings, although not quite as downbeat.
Western experts analyzing satellite photos of the Chinese crop have generally been less worried than Chinese officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated last month that China’s wheat crop would be 3 percent smaller than last year’s.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a disaster, but I don’t think it is a normal crop, either,” said Darin Friedrichs, a founder and market research director at Sitonia Consulting, a Shanghai commodities analysis firm.
Top Chinese officials have issued pessimistic warnings in the past, notably in 2011, to make sure lower-level officials pay close attention to the harvest. A global food shortage may be making Chinese officials especially cautious this year.
A wheat field in Shandong Province, China, in February. The United States estimates that China’s wheat crop will be 3 percent smaller this year.Credit...Guo Xulei/Xinhua via Getty Images
China has a sizable stockpile of wheat for emergencies. But some of the wheat may be fit only for animal consumption given the poor storage, said Joseph W. Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/busi ... 778d3e6de3