Issue of the Week: Hunger, Environment, Population, Economic Opportunity
PublishedAugust 8, 2019
The Food Supply Is At Dire Risk, U.N. Experts Say, The New York Times, August 8, 2019
The top of the front page in The New York Times today had a headline not often seen as a primary headline in the media, as we’ve noted.
The Food Supply Is At Dire Risk, U.N. Experts Say.
In the US, it was close to the top of the news on The CBS Evening News and was the lead on the PBS NewsHour. NBC and ABC didn’t cover it at all–sadly, more the norm.
The BBC, Agence France-Presse and others in Europe and globally have been covering it for days–and yet in other quarters, not.
The fact that it got as much coverage as it did in the US, and was the headline in the Times, is a wake-up call for how urgent and inter-related the issues of hunger, environment, population, disease–and ultimately economic inequality, are.
We’ve covered these issues for decades and recently numerous times–including this year on January 16 when the issue was covered in the media, and most recently on July 15, when a similar UN report was released to virtually no media coverage.
The report released today, the Special Report on Climate Change and Land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is getting more attention.
Here’s the start of the Times article:
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
All of these things are happening at the same time.
All of these things are happening at the same time.
All of these things are happening at the same time.
That’s been our theme song for a long time.
An important note. The Times article refers to over ten percent of the world undernourished. That’s actually the figure for the severely hungry. It’s at least a couple of billion undernourished or malnourished, more food insecure to varying degrees–and as pointed out before, these are conservative numbers. And as can never be underlined enough, children suffer most.
Then there’s this:
They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted.
Sound familiar?
And then, toward the end of the article:
The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights.
This means economic assets, mainly land and financial, and therefore power, transferred from the haves to the have nots.
This is a nice way of saying the politically challenging in the context of a report on consequences by the global organization of purported international rules and governance in which the grinding of various national and other interests of power occur–that without equality, forget the rest.
And if nothing changes, nothing changes.
We’ll be back to this linchpin issue, as usual.
But for now, we focus on the issues of consequences that should focus our attention like an imminent hanging, to paraphrase a famous observation.
And we do so by focusing on the headline article in The Times, which also links to the report itself:
By Christopher Flavelle, August 8, 2019, The New York Times
Cattle grazing outside Sokoto, Nigeria, where large-scale farming is in conflict with local communities. CreditCreditLuis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
