Wednesday-Night

Lessons from the Green Revolution ; Green Revolution: Curse or Blessing? ; Agriculture & Food ; (International Food Policy Research Institute) Agriculture and climate change: An agenda for negotiation in Copenhagen ; Global Treaty on Climate Change ; Climate Change (that is, Global Warming) and Sub-Saharan Africa (2005)

Source
No Food Security without Climate Security
The panelists spoke of the challenges facing farmers and the agricultural community around the world, particularly in developing countries, whose are the most vulnerable to the economic challenges presented by agricultural failure. Farmers, who rely on predictable weather patterns to grow and harvest their crops, are facing tremendous challenges as climate zones shift due to atmospheric warming. An increase of 2 or more degrees would mean the collapse of most agriculture, says Gilberto Camara, the General Director of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Such a collapse would deprive countries around the world not only of their immediate food supply, but of the economic ability to confront the challenges at hand.
Investment in Monocultures violates Human Rights and aggravates Climate Change
On December 10, the report “Red Sugar, Green Deserts. Latin American report on monocultures and violations of the Human Rights to adequate food and housing, to water, to land and to territory” will be launched in Copenhagen by the organizations FIAN (FoodFirst Information & Action Network), HIC-AL (Habitat International Coalition Latin America Regional Office) and Solidarity Sweden-Latin America (Latinamerikagruppe ma). The report, consisting of articles from 26 different writers and cases from 10 Latin American countries, shows that the agroindustrial model based on monocultures has grave impacts on the human rights. Monocultures also cause destruction of biodiversity and the ecosystem, deforestation and increased greenhouse gases, aggravating climate change.
7 December
This should provide food for thought/debate
Kevin Libin: From sci-fi tech, food for the masses
Rethinking Green
(National Post) While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.
“Intensive agricultural production is the key,” says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. “It’s simple arithmetic: The more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it.”
The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.
Climate change deepens cycle of poverty in India
With climate change exacerbating the failure of crops in areas of impoverished India, poor villagers endure suffering at the hands of lenders, who take advantage of corruption, widespread illiteracy and a large bureaucratic banking system. Farmers working under the burden of excessive loans are encouraged to grow soybeans, a more water-intensive crop, forcing them to take out more loans. Los Angeles Times (12/1) 
Research: Climate change makes conflict in Africa more likely
Conflict across the African continent has been 50% more likely in unusually warm years, according to researchers who have tracked the role climate plays in conflicts in Sudan and sub-Saharan Africa. According to the research, crop yields are sensitive to even small changes in temperature, leading to increased conflicts over diminished food resources. BBC (11/24)
6 November
For peat’s sake The world’s wetlands are big sources of greenhouse gases
PEATY wetlands emit about 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 a year as a result of human activity that drains them and thus exposes them to the oxidative effect of the atmosphere … is the conclusion of a report published by Wetlands International. However, the report’s findings contrast with the conclusions of a paper on deforestation also published this week in Nature Geoscience. The conventional figure is that tree-felling causes 20% of man-made CO2 emissions, but the new paper puts that figure at closer to 12%. Together, both studies suggest a change of emphasis may be needed, and that efforts should be made to preserve not just forests, but also bogs.
5 November
No simple solution to livestock and climate change
Simply reducing livestock farming in developing countries will neither cut emissions nor benefit the poor, says livestock expert Carlos Seré.
(SciDev Net) Farming is a significant contributor to climate change, and also a victim. Agricultural activities, including forest clearing, fertilising soils and transporting produce, and indeed livestock farming, account for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile farmers, particularly in developing countries, are threatened by climatic changes such as shifting rainfall patterns and more extreme and unpredictable weather. A recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that US$7 billion will be needed to adapt developing-country agriculture to climate change.
9 October
Dwindling Fish Catch Could Leave a Billion Hungry
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 9 (IPS) - Fish catches are expected to decline dramatically in the world’s tropical regions because of climate change, but may increase in the north, said a new study published Thursday.
This mega-shift in ocean productivity from south to north over the next three to four decades will leave those most reliant on fish for both food and income high and dry.
“The shift is already happening, we’ve been measuring it for the last 20 years,” said Daniel Pauly, a renowned fisheries expert at the University of British Columbia (UBC). In the first major study to examine the effects of climate change on ocean fisheries, a team of researchers from UBC and Princeton University discovered that catch potential will fall 40 percent in the tropics and may increase 30 to 70 percent in high latitude regions, affecting ocean food supply throughout the world by 2055.
1 October
Climate change: Impact on agriculture and costs of adaptation
The unimpeded growth of greenhouse gas emissions is raising the earth’s temperature. The consequences include melting glaciers, more precipitation, more and more extreme weather events, and shifting seasons. The accelerating pace of climate change, combined with global population and income growth, threatens food security everywhere. Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures eventually reduce yields of desirable crops while encouraging weed and pest proliferation. Changes in precipitation patterns increase the likelihood of short-run crop failures and long-run production declines. Although there will be gains in some crops in some regions of the world, the overall impacts of climate change on agriculture are expected to be negative, threatening global food security. Download Report
19 July
One Wednesday Nighter with extensive interest in and knowledge of environmental matters writes:
Margaret Wente’s written on farming in Africa in today’s Globe and I can’t say she’s right. The dangers of oversimplifying … she doesn’t even refer to the Green Revolution’s success story, the pre-GMO IR8, let alone the environmental destruction caused by pesticides in the Philippines etc, just the yields and that environmentalists are stopping agricultural progress in Africa.
Don’t mention dumping of subsidised rice, corruption, lack of water, the fact that TRIPS are the biggest inhibitor to GMO take-up, and she doesn’t mention the fact that in her criticism of organic farming that organic no-tillage requires about 1/4 of the energy that conventional farming requires without killing all the microbial life in the soil essential to biodiversity.
Margaret Wente: Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa
My friends would be horrified to learn their convictions are keeping children hungry
(Globe & Mail) There are many reasons for Africa’s desperate plight. The misguided environmental enthusiasms of the West is one of them. Powerful environmental lobbies have persuaded African governments to ban genetically engineered crops that would improve drought resistance and ward off common pests that can destroy an entire harvest. They have discouraged the international donor community from supporting science-based agricultural modernization projects. They have even campaigned against conventionally developed modern seeds and nitrogen fertilizers, even though these are the very same technologies Western farmers embraced to become more productive and escape poverty. Western interest groups have foisted their own anti-scientific fantasies on to the poorest continent on Earth, with disastrous results.
10 July
Unveiling Food Plan, Obama Presses Africa on Corruption
President Obama told African countries on Friday that the legacy of colonialism was not an excuse for failing to build prosperous, democratic societies even as he unveiled a $20 billion program financed by the United States and other countries to help developing nations grow more food to feed their people.
6 July
Millions Hungry as Warming Shifts Seasons: Oxfam
(Reuters/Planet Ark) In a new report, global aid agency Oxfam says impoverished communities are already being hit hard by the effects of global warming, including increased drought. Without international funding to help them cope and tough targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the food, water, health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people will be put at even greater risk. Oxfam says interviews it carried out with farmers in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America show that seasons are shrinking in number and variety. This is destroying harvests, pushing farmers to abandon traditional crops and causing widespread hunger — which, the agency predicts, will likely be “climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future.” Rainfall is reported to be more erratic, shorter and more violent. Unusual weather events — including storms, drier spells and fluctuating temperatures — are happening more often. And farmers say winds and storms have got stronger.
Suffering the Science: Climate change, people, and poverty - Oxfam International Briefing Paper
(Oxfam) ‘Suffering the Science’ combines the latest scientific observations on climate change, with evidence from the communities Oxfam works with in almost 100 countries around the world, to reveal how the changing climate is already hitting poor people hard. The report outlines evidence of how climate change is affecting every issue linked to poverty and development from access to food and water to health and security. It warns that without immediate action 50 years of development gains in poor countries will be permanently lost. One of the most worrying trends highlighted in the report is the impact of erratic weather on agriculture. Poor farmers, who can no longer rely on seasons, are losing crop after crop because of sudden heat waves or heavy rains. ‘Suffering the Science’ has been published ahead of the G8 Summit in Italy (8 – 12 July) where climate change is on the agenda.
14 June
UN Talks Seek Links In Food, Climate Crises
(Reuters/Planet Ark) BONN - A new focus on the impact of farming on climate change could both curb carbon emissions and prod efforts to boost yields and rural incomes in developing countries, delegates told a U.N. climate conference.
But curbing greenhouse gases from farms also means confronting complex tradeoffs, especially to try and feed an extra 3 billion people by 2050 while encroaching less on forests, burning of which stokes carbon emissions.
In addition, new incentives to curb greenhouse gases from farms such as carbon offsetting under discussion in the United States, in the U.N. talks and at the World Bank may be inappropriate and must favour smallholders, say campaigners.
… draft texts for a new treaty … refer to high-carbon, organic soils as a possible store of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Africa has lower agricultural yields than farms in Asia, Europe and America. Climate-friendly practices boost fertility, especially where farming has exhausted the land.
Globally, agriculture accounts for about 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But in some countries the figure is far higher.
A key challenge, however, is that many practices which store more carbon and cut emissions of power greenhouse gases from fertiliser, such as organic agriculture, can be lower yielding than intensive alternatives. But a drive for freer trade has cut food reserves, while new technologies have increased farmer indebtedness. Some green groups oppose one possible solution — to use more genetically-modified crops (GMOs).
Climate-friendly measures can boost soil fertility and aid water retention. In Kenya farmers are planting trees among crops to boost tired soils, said Pete Smith, lead author for farming on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “They cut off the leaves from fast-growing trees, feed them to goats, so their productivity goes up, they then take the manure and put it back into the soil which improves the soil fertility.” The trees store carbon in their trunks and soil.
Another practice is where farmers plow the soil less to keep high-carbon organic matter underground. That can also aid drought resistance, because not plowing keeps leaves on the ground which trap moisture.
1 April
Put agriculture at heart of climate talks, says report
(SciDev Net) A campaign to drive agriculture to the forefront of climate change negotiations took a step forward yesterday with the launch of a document by food policy experts. Agriculture will be “dramatically” affected by climate change, says the paper, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). It could also become a potent brake on climate change if the right research and policies are implemented.