At the same time we’re being hit by increased prices for gas at the pump, the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute (EPI) reports that world food prices are set for a dramatic jump in the coming year.
According to the group’s calculations, four successive shortfalls in annual grain harvests have reduced the world’s carry-over stocks to their lowest level in 30 years, amounting to only 59 days of consumption. That is 11 days short of the 70-day level that is traditionally considered the minimum needed for food security.
The last time global stocks were so low in the early 1970s, wheat and rice prices doubled with disastrous consequences for millions of the world’s poor. A similar pattern may be asserting itself now, according to Lester Brown, EPI’s founder and president, as basic food and feed commodities are on the rise.
Brown says that the challenge of rebuilding the stocks to the 70-day consumption level will be very difficult to overcome, particularly if early indications for the winter wheat crop, which was planted last fall, are not hopeful.
Category Archives: Environment
Make Earth Day 2004 count
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While some people may plant trees or pick up litter to honour Earth Day, Yahoo (by way of Debra Galant) points the way to how you might go about Saving the World in a Day.
As we read every day, and as we are aware, environmental crises abound as our own actions and those of industry pollute and degrade the fragile environment we all need to survive. What can we do? Well, certainly this provides some insight as answer to that question.
First launched as an environmental awareness event in the United States in 1970, Earth Day (April 22nd) is celebrated as the birth of the environmental movement. Spearheaded by Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson and Harvard University student Denis Hayes, Earth Day has become a powerful catalyst for change, involving some 20 million participants each April 22nd, in teach-ins that address decades of environmental pollution.
In Canada in 1990, two million Canadians joined 200 million people in 141 nations across the globe in celebrating the first International Earth Day. Earth Day serves to put needed pressure on heads of nation states to address issues such as climate change and the world wide loss of species.
In many places, including Canada, Earth Day has grown into Earth Week and even Earth Month, when thousands of events take place, ranging from waterway clean-ups to engaging in a variety of other pollution solutions. This is Earth Day. Organize, volunteer, and learn what you can do to help make this a better world for all of us.
Stop the Bush Air Pollution Plan
Working in concert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Earth Action Center has released this flash cartoon which, in a somewhat less academic fashion than is true of the article just below, attacks the Bush administration’s environmental policies, employing the services of everyone’s favourite miscreant, Tommy Toxic.
The Global Environment: Restoring Scientific Integrity
“Science, like any field of endeavour, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now, more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.”
— President George H. W. Bush, 1990
On a wide range of issues the current U.S. administration of George W. Bush has set about to suppress and distort scientific analysis from federal agencies, taking actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels. This misuse of science has serious consequences for the health and safety of the world’s peoples, as well as the natural environment which provides life and sustenance to us all.
Across a broad range of issues — from childhood lead poisoning and mercury emissions to climate change, reproductive health, and nuclear weapons — the reactionary Bush administration (one of the most regressive governments in modern history) continues its destructive campaign of distortion and disinformation, censoring all independent scientific findings that contradict its pro-business policies.
As part of their mandate, Bushies’ in-house scientific advisory panel has set about to manipulate underlying science research to align results with predetermined political decisions; to undermine the independence of university-community nominated science advisory panels, by subjecting panel nominees to political litmus tests that have little or no bearing on their expertise, nominating instead non-experts or underqualified individuals from outside the scientific community, who possess industry ties and interests that are demonstrably contrary to the common good.
In many cases, the Bush administration has disbanded science advisory committees altogether.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has this morning released a report titled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking (in PDF form), a damning indictment of the interventionist policies of the current Bush administration.