The Politics of Hunger

[JBeukema]

Spotlighting China as an example, BBC News reports that “[t]he Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index is at its highest level since being created in 1990. As food prices rise,” the story adds, “so does poverty.” In just the first few months of this year, some Asian markets have witnesses as much as a 10 percent increase in local food prices, a shift that could potentially plunge almost 65 million people in poverty, according to some estimates.
Though observers and commentators are quick to importune governments to act, making all the usual allegations of “market failure,” the worldwide food problem is a feature of statist intervention. As law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan observed (regarding intellectual property laws), “Content industries have an interest in creating artificial scarcity by whatever legal and technological means they have at their disposal.”
And the same is true of commodity providers whose interest it is to ensure that the nutrition we need to survive comes through them. If a few giant, state-subsidized and -protected farms, and wholesalers, and retailers can unilaterally command supply, they can demand in payment whatever capricious price they determine. This propensity — ever more cartelized industry with ever fewer “competitors” — is endemic to state capitalism, but it is not a feature of genuine free markets.
Free markets, on the contrary, divide and moderate market power by denying special protection and privilege and opening competition to a wide assortment of both entrants and methods. Only where potential threats to corporate monopolization are precluded by force of law — through, among other impediments, “safety” and “consumer protection” standards — can today’s “captains of industry” ascend to market dominance.

The Politics of Hunger

 

[waltky]

Progress against hunger has slowed in the last five years...

UN Pushes 'Smart Crops' as Rice Alternative to Tackle Hunger in Asia
March 14, 2017 — Asia needs to make extra efforts to defeat hunger after progress has slowed in the last five years, including promoting so-called "smart crops" as an alternative to rice, the head of the U.N. food agency in the region said.

Kundhavi Kadiresan, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Asia, said the region needs to focus on reaching the most marginalized people, such as the very poor or those living in mountainous areas. The Asia-Pacific region halved the number of hungry people from 1990 to 2015 but the rate of progress slowed in many countries - such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Cambodia - in the last five years, according to a December FAO report. "The last mile is always difficult.. so extra efforts, extra resources and more targeted interventions are needed," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of a business forum on food security in Jakarta on Tuesday.

She said government and businesses needed to develop policies to help make food more affordable, while changing Asians' diets that rely heavily on rice. "We have focused so much on rice that we haven't really looked at some of those crops like millets, sorghum and beans," she said. A campaign is underway to promote these alternatives as "smart crops" to make them more attractive, Kadiresan said. "We are calling them smart crops to get people not to think about them as poor people's food but smart people's food," she said, adding that they are not only nutritious but also more adaptable to climate change.

A worker carries a bale of dry millet at a field on the outskirts of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad​

Soaring rice prices, slowing economic expansion and poorer growth in agricultural productivity have been blamed for the slowdown in efforts to tackle hunger. More than 60 percent of the world's hungry are in Asia-Pacific, while nearly one out of three children in the region suffers from stunting, according to the FAO. Achieving zero hunger by 2030 is one of the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals adopted by member states in 2015.

UN Pushes 'Smart Crops' as Rice Alternative to Tackle Hunger in Asia

 

[waltky]

More than 20 million people facing starvation...

Africa has worst hunger crisis in 70 years amid budget cuts
Mar 23,`17 -- Africa faces the world's largest humanitarian crisis since 1945, with more than 20 million people facing starvation, a cut in funding to humanitarian agencies working in famine-affected areas will cause untold suffering, a spokesman for the World Food Program said in Johannesburg Thursday, responding to questions about U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to cut $10 billion in foreign aid.

"Any cuts at this time are extremely significant, not just for us but for any U.N. agencies and any aid organization," said David Orr, WFP's Africa spokesman, at a media briefing in Johannesburg. "With the magnitude of needs at the moment is it vital that we continue with a high level of assistance."

The current hunger crisis is in three African countries, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria, as well as nearby Yemen. The U.S. is WFP's largest donor and was one of the organization's founders. Last year it contributed more than $2 billion, representing about 24 percent of WFP's total budget, Orr said.

U.N. operations in South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria will require more than $5.6 billion this year, he said. At least $4.4 billion is needed by the end of March to avert a catastrophe, he said, but so far the U.N. has only received $90 million. "The more dramatic cuts in any aid budgets, the more the number of debts, the more suffering there is going to be," Orr said.

"We have a situation where famine has been declared in two counties in Unity state in South Sudan. That means there are already people dying in those places. This has been caused by a combination of factors including conflict, which prevents access. Humanitarian intervention is very difficult. Huge numbers of people are displaced," Orr said. "Now famine is threatening in other parts of South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen."

News from The Associated Press

 

[The Original Tree]

We are in what is called a CO2 dessert presently

This period in Earth's Geologic History is experiencing one of the lowest levels of CO2 ever.

We are still in an Ice Age. There have only been two other periods in Earth's history when CO2 was this low and both were Ice Ages.

CO2 has nothing to do with Climate Change other than increases in it follows warming trends and extended growing seasons rather than proceeds them.

What it does effect is crop yields and plant growth. If we could somehow increase CO2 from its present low of 400 ppm to 1,000 ppm we could get the desserts to bloom again, increase crop yields and increase by Billions of
Acres the amount of farmable land we could use.

The solution to hunger is simple:
More CO2 Equals More Food!

 

[waltky]

Using information technology to fight hunger...

Could Big Data Help End Hunger in Africa?
May 30, 2017 — Computer algorithms power much of modern life from our Facebook feeds to international stock exchanges. Could they help end malnutrition and hunger in Africa? The International Center for Tropical Agriculture thinks so.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture has spent the past four years developing the Nutrition Early Warning System, or NEWS. The goal is to catch the subtle signs of a hunger crisis brewing in Africa as much as a year in advance. CIAT says the system uses machine learning. As more information is fed into the system, the algorithms will get better at identifying patterns and trends. The system will get smarter. Information Technology expert Andy Jarvis leads the project. "The cutting edge side of this is really about bringing in streams of information from multiple sources and making sense of it. ... But it is a huge volume of information and what it does, the novelty then, is making sense of that using things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and condensing it into simple messages," he said. Other nutrition surveillance systems exist, like FEWSnet, the Famine Early Warning System Network which was created in the mid-1980s.

But CIAT says NEWS will be able to draw insights from a massive amount of diverse data enabling it to identify hunger risks faster than traditional methods. "What is different about NEWS is that it pays attention to malnutrition, not just drought or famine, but the nutrition outcome that really matters, malnutrition especially in women and children. For the first time, we are saying these are the options way ahead of time. That gives policy makers an opportunity to really do what they intend to do which is make the lives of women and children better in Africa,” said Dr. Mercy Lung’aho, a CIAT nutrition expert. While food emergencies like famine and drought grab headlines, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture says chronic malnutrition affects one in four people in Africa, taking a serious toll on economic growth and leaving them especially vulnerable in times of crisis.

Senior policy officer Olufunso Somorin is with the Africa Development Bank. “In 2030, 13 years from now, Africa is going to have 200 million children below the age of five. Now once a child is stunted or misses a level of nourishment at that age, it affects that child psychologically, economically, socially. So a stunted child in the future is actually a stunted economy. So linking issues of nutrition at individual level to Africa’s development and transformation on a broader scale is important," said Somorin. CIAT says African governments will be able to access NEWS via “nutrition dashboards” where they can get risk assessments, alerts, and recommendations. The system is expected to become operational in four African countries, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Nigeria, by year's end.

Could Big Data Help End Hunger in Africa?

 

[waltky]

UN says number of hungry people worldwide is growing...

UN says number of hungry people worldwide is growing, with climate change partly to blame
September 11, 2018 -- The number of hungry people in the world is growing again, in large part due to climate change that is wreaking havoc on crop production in much of the developing world, the United Nations said Tuesday. Major U.N. agencies said in an annual report Tuesday that the number of hungry people facing chronic food deprivation increased to 821 million in 2017 from 804 million in 2016, reversing recent downward trends.

That accounts for one in every 9 people. "Hunger has been on the rise over the past three years, returning to levels from a decade ago," said a news release Tuesday on the report. "This reversal in progress sends a clear warning that more must be done and urgently if the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger is to be achieved by 2030."

South America and Africa showed the worst increase. "This message today should frighten the world," said David Beasley, head of the World Food Program. Beasley, a Trump administration nominee, acknowledged that climate change as well as conflict were fueling the rise in malnutrition globally. "Climate impact is real," he said, though he demurred when asked whether the cause was man-made.

Analysis in the report found that climate variability -- extreme droughts and floods -- are already undermining production of wheat, rice and maize in tropical and temperate regions, and that the trend is expected to worsen as temperatures increase and become more extreme. The report called for policies to target groups most vulnerable to malnutrition, including infants, children, adolescent girls and women. It called for greater efforts to promote policies that help communities adapt to climate change and build resilience.

Poor progress has been made in reducing child stunting, the report says, with nearly 151 million children aged under five too short for their age due to malnutrition in 2017, compared to 165 million in 2012. Globally, Africa and Asia accounted for 39 percent and 55 percent of all stunted children, respectively. Beasley said if the world is failing today with a population at 7.5 billion and all the wealth and technology that is available, "wait until people 30 years from now -- when we have 10 billion people, when people in London, in Washington, D.C., and Chicago and Paris -- when they don't have enough to eat."

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