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Where and why food prices lead to social upheaval - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...prices-lead-to-social-upheaval food security authoritarianism transition transitions ArabSpring economy
shared by Ed Webb on 22 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Unlike other commodities, global food prices have followed a different trajectory. Although down from near-historic highs in 2007-2008 and 2011, they are still higher than at any point in the previous three decades.
  • The economic effects of higher food prices are clear: Since 2007, higher prices have put a brake on two decades of steady process in reducing world hunger. But the spikes in food prices over the past decade have also thrust food issues back onto the security agenda, particularly after the events of the Arab Spring. High food prices were one of the factors pushing people into the streets during the regionwide political turmoil that began in late 2010. Similar dynamics were at play in 2007-2008, when near-record prices led to food-related protests and riots in 48 countries.
  • Unlike energy and electronics, demand for basic foodstuffs is income-inelastic: Whether I have adequate income has no effect on my need for sustenance. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of the post-2007 ‘food riots’ identified by a team at the New England Complex Systems Institute occurred in Africa and Asia, which are home to more than 92 percent of the world’s poor and chronically food-insecure. Careful empirical work bears out this conventional wisdom: High global food prices are more destabilizing in low-income countries, where per capita incomes are lower.
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  • Politics might affect the relationship between food prices and protest through two channels. The first is the extent to which governments shield urban consumers from high global prices. Governments in developing countries often subsidize food purchases, especially those of urban dwellers, shifting welfare from rural producers to urban consumers. But this observation raises the second-order question of the conditions under which governments will subsidize urban consumers. We hypothesized that autocratic governments were more likely to shield urban consumers. While urban dwellers can riot in the absence of elections, rural dwellers have fewer channels through which they can voice grievances.
  • democracies and anocracies did enact more pro-rural food policy. In particular, democracies in Africa and Asia enact policies that favor urban areas less and rural areas more. These take the form of enhancing farmer incomes and raising consumer prices, which often causes protests and rioting. Lessening urban bias in food policy may be good pro-poor policy, given the continued concentration of poverty in rural areas, but it carries political risks.
  • the Arab Spring reflects some of the risks autocratic leaders face when attempting to insulate urban consumers from global market prices. Consumer subsidies have long been part of the “authoritarian bargain” between the state and citizens in the Middle East and North Africa, and attempts to withdraw them have been met with protest before: Egypt’s bread intifada, which erupted over an attempt to reform food subsidies, killed 800 in 1977. These subsidies explicitly encouraged citizens across the region to evaluate their governments’ effectiveness in terms of their ability to maintain low consumer prices — prices that, given these countries’ dependence on food imports, those governments ultimately could not control
  • Our findings point to the difficult tradeoffs facing governments in developing countries as they attempt to pursue two different definitions of food security simultaneously: food security as an element of human security, and food security as a means of ensuring government survival and quelling urban unrest. These tradeoffs appear to be particularly acute for developing democracies.
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How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman | Foreign Policy - 2 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/..._sachs_created_the_food_crisis food markets speculation hunger land agriculture
shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food
  • After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies -- not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world
  • Futures markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real, physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut, Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide" hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals. On the other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased.
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  • Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to "roll" their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line. And since the deflationary impact of shorting a position simply wasn't part of the GSCI, professional grain traders could make a killing by anticipating the market fluctuations these "rolls" would inevitably cause. "I make a living off the dumb money," commodity trader Emil van Essen told Businessweek last year. Commodity traders employed by the banks that had created the commodity index funds in the first place rode the tides of profit
  • dozens of speculative non-physical hedgers followed Goldman's lead and joined the commodities index game, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to name but a few purveyors of commodity index funds. The scene had been set for food inflation that would eventually catch unawares some of the largest milling, processing, and retailing corporations in the United States, and send shockwaves throughout the world
  • when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since
  • The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world's "food insecure" to a peak of 1 billion -- a number never seen before.
  • a problem familiar to those versed in the history of tulips, dot-coms, and cheap real estate: a food bubble
  • The more the price of food commodities increases, the more money pours into the sector, and the higher prices rise
  • Not only does the world's food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.
  • speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain -- from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel
  • from 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent -- and has kept rising
  • I asked a handful of wheat brokers what would happen if the U.S. government simply outlawed long-only trading in food commodities for investment banks. Their reaction: laughter. One phone call to a bona-fide hedger like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland and one secret swap of assets, and a bank's stake in the futures market is indistinguishable from that of an international wheat buyer. What if the government outlawed all long-only derivative products, I asked? Once again, laughter. Problem solved with another phone call, this time to a trading office in London or Hong Kong; the new food derivative markets have reached supranational proportions, beyond the reach of sovereign law
  • nervous countries have responded instead with me-first policies, from export bans to grain hoarding to neo-mercantilist land grabs in Africa. And efforts by concerned activists or international agencies to curb grain speculation have gone nowhere. All the while, the index funds continue to prosper, the bankers pocket the profits, and the world's poor teeter on the brink of starvation
  • Ed Webb on 24 Aug 12
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A declaration from North Africa: food sovereignty is a right | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...aration-from-north-africa-food MENA northafrica agriculture food environment economy IMF IBRD worldbank WTO activism
shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • On December 15, 16 and 17, 2017, ATTAC Morocco, a member of the global network for the abolition of illegitimate debts (CADTM), organised a Maghreb seminar on free trade agreements, agriculture and food sovereignty under the slogan: No to colonial agreements, for the defence of people's sovereign right on their agricultural, food and environmental systems. The seminar was held in Agadir, Morocco with the participation of activists coming from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
  • trade agreements have deepened the control of multinational companies on agriculture and maritime fishing, exacerbated food speculation, and destroyed subsistence agricultural and fishing systems. Moreover, they accelerated the unlimited quest for the promotion of genetically modified seeds and the generalisation of the export-oriented agriculture and fishing industry. In the global south, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) are pursuing neoliberal policies that further deregulate, open borders to the invasion of foreign capital and subsidised products and ensure the transfer of profits and wealth. These neoliberal dictates are leading to an increase in public debt at the expense of the popular classes who shoulder the burden of austerity policies
  • affirm our support for people's food sovereignty and their right to determine their own food system, a system that ensures the production of healthy food in sufficient quantity while protecting nature and remaining in harmony with it
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  • resources for this purpose must be provided through the suspension of debt service payments and through the cancellation of illegitimate public debts
  • we are planning on organising campaigns of denunciation, raising awareness and initiatives in order to encourage common struggles and establish forms of coordination and solidarity with movements sharing the same objectives
  • Food sovereignty is the antithesis of the productivist capitalist food system, which is responsible for the destruction of natural resources and a climate chaos that threatens the lives of millions of people. It is peasant agriculture and subsistence fishing that feed humanity and preserve the environment, rather than the intensive, industrial, commercial and chemical agriculture promoted by capitalism.
  • collective struggle against free trade agreements, fisheries agreements and the World Trade Organization, as well as against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which enslave people through the debt system
  • initiation and promotion of experiments in popular farming systems that aim at breaking free from food dependence
  • Broadening international solidarity in order to stop the growing repression against popular mobilizations (peasants, fishermen, indigenous, and agricultural workers, etc.) and to organize and protect their lives, their lands, their environment and their food traditions.
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Where Will Everyone Go? - 0 views

features.propublica.org/...efugees-move-across-continents climate migration prediction modeling future hunger poverty violence instability
shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83%. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.
  • As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.
  • For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north.
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  • the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1% of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing 1 of every 3 people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on
  • In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than 8 million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.
  • Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go
  • Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only goodwill and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war
  • To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders
  • The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air conditioning will simply die.
  • If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)
  • As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.
  • the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes
  • Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.
  • Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just 2 million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.
  • North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65% of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.”
  • Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years
  • every one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast populations.
  • rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places.
  • Once the model was built and layered with both approaches — econometric and gravity — we looked at how people moved as global carbon concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic development.)
  • We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.
  • Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador’s crop, slashing harvests by 70%. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as “a progressive deterioration” of Salvadorans’ livelihoods.
  • climate change can act as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a “threat multiplier.”
  • For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded. It’s in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure, resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn that the most severe strains on society will unfold
  • the World Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035
  • now a little more than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas, but by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67% will. In just a decade, 4 out of every 10 urban residents — 2 billion people around the world — will live in slums
  • El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs — already a third of some residents’ budgets — will get pricier, and warming will drive down economic output by 8%, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable as the places farther south.
  • High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador — just like rural Guatemala — to empty out, even as its cities grow. Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy, though — by, say, investing in climate mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders — they would trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever.
  • By midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador — which has 6.4 million people and is the most densely populated country in Central America — will be 86% urban
  • Most would-be migrants don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil — is an entirely different trial.
  • I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing migrants on Mexico’s southern border were offered rides and tortas and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units, as if they were enemy soldiers.
  • Models can’t say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply. At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will most likely see its own climate exodus. One in 6 Mexicans now rely on farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability per capita could decrease by as much as 88% in places, and crop yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most likely come from Chiapas.
  • even as 1 million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current stresses far worse.
  • Already, by late last year, the Mexican government’s ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets, unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation. It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come from.
  • a new Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against immigrants
  • Trump had, as another senior government official told me, “held a gun to Mexico’s head,” demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25% tariff on trade. Such a tax could break the back of Mexico’s economy overnight, and so López Obrador’s government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized force to the border.
  • laying blame at the feet of neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a “poverty factory” with no regional development policies to address it. It was the system — capitalism itself — that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico’s leaders. “We didn’t anticipate that the globalization of the economy, the globalization of the law … would have such a devastating effect,”
  • No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.
  • “If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die trying to get to the United States.”
  • In the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.
  • Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can never confidently pilot their own economic future.
  • The United States refused to join 164 other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement. At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid — money for everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture — that has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.’s in Guatemala produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings they are owed under law.
  • There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration told me recently, “Mobility is resilience.” Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for themselves where they live helps make them safer.
  • what may be the worst-case scenario: one in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated, closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life
  • the global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring
  • America’s demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth alone doesn’t overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and exacerbating inequalities.
  • At the same time, the United States and other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and improved farmers’ incomes. It can’t reverse climate change, but it can buy time.
  • Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper.
  • Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.
  • The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years
  • “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”
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Food crisis looms as Ukrainian wheat shipments grind to halt | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...9e-f29b-4677-b69e-a6e5b973cad6 Russia Ukraine food crisis inflation war Lebanon Egypt Syria Turkey WFP
shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Russia and Ukraine supply almost a third of the world’s wheat exports and since the Russian assault on its neighbour, ports on the Black Sea have come to a virtual standstill. As a result, wheat prices have soared to record highs, overtaking levels seen during the food crisis of 2007-08.
  • agricultural experts and policymakers have warned of the impact of delayed shipments on countries reliant on the region for wheat, grain, sunflower oil and barley
  • The surge in prices will fuel soaring food inflation — already at a seven-year high of 7.8 per cent in January — and the biggest impact will be on the food security of poorer grain importers, warned analysts and food aid organisations
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  • Ukraine accounts for 90 per cent of Lebanon’s wheat imports and is a leading supplier for countries including Somalia, Syria and Libya. Lebanon is “really struggling with an already high import bill and this is only going to make things worse,”
  • Russia also provides its Black Sea neighbour Turkey with more than 70 per cent of its wheat imports
  • Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation in Turkey had had hit a 20-year high of 54.4 per cent in February. “The war is only going to exacerbate the cost of food,”
  • “What’s critical here is that the Black Sea offers a logistical and price advantage . . . Costs will rise significantly when [Turkey] buys from the US or Australia,” he said. “Even if the war ends tomorrow, Ukraine’s planting season has already been disrupted and it will impact the 2022 harvest regardless.”
  • The UN World Food Programme, which procures grains and food to distribute to poorer countries, bought just under 1.4m tonnes of wheat last year of which 70 per cent came from Ukraine and Russia.
  • The last time wheat prices spiked to these levels in 2007 and 2008 because of severe production declines in leading producing countries such as Australia and Russia, protests spread through nearly 40 countries from Haiti to the Ivory Coast, while a jump in grain prices in 2009-10 is regarded as one of the triggers of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East.
  • Egyptian authorities say their wheat inventories will last until mid June and the Egyptian local harvest should start coming in by mid April. Any rise in subsidised bread prices and further increase in food inflation in Egypt “increases the threat of social unrest,”
  • Wheat inventories are tight everywhere and as Chinese and South Korean buyers of Ukrainian corn, used to feed livestock, sought sellers elsewhere, EU agricultural ministers on Wednesday discussed allowing farmers to boost production using the 10 per cent of land they usually leave fallow in response to the war in Ukraine.
  • “The supply chain is broken,”
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Arab States Buy up Vast Tracts of African Farmland as Food Prices Skyrocket | Green Pro... - 0 views

www.greenprophet.com/...mland-as-food-prices-skyrocket peak oil food GCC Gulf security climate
shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia and UAE, have decided to take matters into their own hands, according to Arabian Business. They are using their vast oil wealth to buy up tracts of land the size of small countries in Africa, intending to turn them into agricultural hotbeds to feed their multitudes. They have paid millions of dollars to the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia, and smaller amounts to those of Kenya, Sudan and Mozambique, for the use of hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural farmland.
  • “It wasn’t only the prices going high that worried some of the Gulf countries, it was also the fact that, at the same time, a number of major food exporters, decided to impose export bans in an attempt to keep prices down” said David Hallam, an analyst with the FAO. “So what they feared was that not only were they facing high prices, but it might not be possible to secure supplies at any price.” And that, in turn, makes the wealthy Arab states, with the food crisis for their own rapidly growing populations, only more concerned. High oil prices lead to food shortages, which have destabilizing political effects. Interesting times ahead.
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Agriculture in Europe to decline as Asian output grows: UN, OECD - 0 views

www.yahoo.com/...t-grows-un-oecd-131008078.html Africa MENA food water security agriculture
shared by Ed Webb on 30 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Agricultural production in Western Europe is set to decline over the coming decade, with output in Africa and Asia expected to increase, the OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said
  • Middle East meanwhile faces a rising threat of food insecurity, the report said, as conflict, climate change and poor policy all have the effect of keeping the region overly reliant on imports
  • In sub-Saharan Africa, crop production is set to expand by 30 percent, with meat and dairy both set to grow by 25 percent
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  • the region's food security is set to remain dependent on global markets, because "domestic production capacity will remain insufficient to meet the region's growing consumption needs"
  • The Middle East, which is mired in conflict and political unrest, has a "high and growing dependence" on imports for key food products, the report said, leaving the region in a state of increasing food insecurity.Arable land and water are growing more scarce in the region, both because of climate change pushing temperatures up, and as a result of poor agricultural policy from governments."It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the water issue in the Middle East and North Africa region," the report said."Along with conflict, it is the most profound man-made threat to the region's future,"
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Despite having enough food, humanity risks hunger 'crises': UN | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...er-crises-191018195649036.html food hunger agriculture sustainability climate security UN FAO future population
shared by Ed Webb on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Despite producing more food than it can consume, humanity risks a menacing mix of "food crises" brought on by social inequalities, environmental degradation, climate change and wars, a UN report warned
  • the number of people who suffer from hunger worldwide has been slowly increasing since 2015
  • A key obstacle is unequal access: while some people throw away food they buy too much of, others cannot afford or find the nutrition they need
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  • too many people relying on calories from fat and sugar which are poor in vitamins and minerals
  • The global population will expand from 7.7 billion in 2019 to 8.5 billion in 2030, mostly in already hungry Africa and Asia, piling pressure on limited available resources. Urban populations will grow by 50 percent by 2030, while rural ones by more than 20 percent in some countries.
  • Migration fuelled by conflicts and natural disasters, in turn, worsened by global warming, will further exacerbate the situation
  • As more and more people are lifted out of poverty, there has been a higher demand for animal food products, the report noted. This, in turn, has contributed to deforestation to make way for farms growing animals and their feed. In a vicious cycle, shrinking forests mean fewer trees to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change.
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See where water is scarcest in the world - and why we need to conserve - Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...water-scarcity-map-solutions water climate development economy SDGs agriculture
shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • An analysis of newly released data from the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that by 2050 an additional billion people will be living in arid areas and regions with high water stress, where at least 40 percent of the renewable water supply is consumed each year. Two-fifths of the world’s population — 3.3 billion people in total — currently live in such areas.
  • the Middle East and North Africa regions have the highest level of water stress in the world. Climate change is shifting traditional precipitation patterns, making the regions drier and reducing their already scarce water supplies. Population growth and industrial use of water are expected to increase demand.
  • The WRI analysis accounts for surface water, but not groundwater stores that are tapped when lakes, rivers and reservoirs run dry. This means the new estimates may underestimate risk. Many rural areas use groundwater for drinking water and farmers worldwide rely on it for irrigation. But groundwater often replenishes much more slowly than surface water.
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  • Only half of 1 percent of the world’s water supply is fresh water in liquid form. The rest is saltwater or frozen into glaciers.
  • its biggest use, globally, is for food production
  • “It’s much more useful and easier to live with if the water all comes regularly and without these extremes. But more and more, that’s not the case.”
  • If surface water is in short supply, people often turn to groundwater, which can be rapidly depleted. In India, nearly 60 percent of the population makes a living from farming. For decades, the government supported farmers by subsidizing the cost of diesel to run water pumps and tractors and by purchasing wheat and rice at an artificially high price. Water demand to irrigate rice and wheat fields is contributing to groundwater depletion in the northern region of Punjab.
  • “More people demand more water, but also each person demands more water as they get wealthier,” Iceland said. “So as you get wealthier, you move from a more grain and vegetable-oriented diet to a more meat-oriented diet.”
  • Growing and feeding a cow to create one pound of beef requires as much as 1,800 gallons of water, by some estimates. Calorie-for-calorie, that’s almost eight times as much water as vegetables and 20 times as much water as cereals like wheat and corn.
  • Water-intensive crops like sugar cane and cotton could also drive demand in sub-Saharan Africa, where water use is expected to double over the next 20 years. Many areas still lack infrastructure to reliably deliver water for irrigation. As those pipelines are built, more farmers will have access to water, which will further strain surface water supplies. Inefficient water use and unsustainable management could lower gross domestic product in the region by 6 percent, according to WRI.
  • One Saudi company is growing alfalfa in the Arizona desert, pulling from the area’s groundwater supplies. That alfalfa is then shipped overseas to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia, where industrial-scale farming of forage crops has been banned to conserve the nation’s water.
  • Water is also integral to mining lithium and other minerals used in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy infrastructure. These critical minerals are often found in arid places like Chile, which is already water-stressed and is projected to use 20 percent more water by 2050, according to WRI.
  • Since farming accounts for the most water use globally, experts say that micro-sprinklers and drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation are an important solution.
  • reducing meat and dairy consumption can decrease individual water footprints. Reducing food waste could also help reduce water use. In the United States, more than a third of food ends up in the landfill. The biggest single contributor to food waste is throwing away food at home.
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Israelis want to know: Where has all the butter gone? - Green Prophet | Impact News for... - 0 views

www.greenprophet.com/...-where-has-all-the-butter-gone Israel food security agriculture trade China UK Britain
shared by Ed Webb on 03 Nov 19 - Cached
  • “The fact that Israel’s largest food company is owned by the Chinese government will lead to a situation where the company implements policies that serve the interests of China [and not Israel],” he said in an interview with Ynet. “For China, Tnuva isn’t just a food company,” Halevi added. “China is doing everything it can to involve itself in Israeli research and development. The Chinese are very creative and flexible. If we do not wake up in time we will find that they will take over not only our food, but our academia. We must organize in order to defend Israeli assets, which are part of our national security conception.”
  • “A Tnuva spokesperson said that the only cause for the butter shortage is a shortage in milk-derived fat, due to the limited milk production quota set by the government.  Tnuva’s stock of milk fat, which it uses for butter and cream production, began running out in December last year, which could explain its decision to cut butter production in early 2019. In order to meet the demand for butter, Israel must increase milk quotas, several people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity told Calcalist. The industry requested 60 million liters of milk a year be added to its quota to allow it to extract more fat to use for butter production, the people said.”
  • Until recently, imported butter bore a heavy tax (from 126-140% for table butter and 144-160% for industrial butter), which importers were reluctant to pay because the government forbade selling it for more than the regulation price of NIS 3.94 per 100 grams.  Many importers simply declined to bring butter in.
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  • there are currently hundreds of containers of imported foods, and butter among them, sitting in Haifa and Ashdod ports. Due to the High Holidays that occurred in September and October, the containers have not been inspected by the Ministry of Health, and so have not been released
  • The Economy and Industry ministries recommend getting rid of  tariffs on imported butter and opening the Israeli market to competition. But under Israel’s current interim government,  policy changes are unlikely to be made any time soon. In the meantime, the Agriculture and Economy ministries cite unequal distribution of import quotas and blame each other for it.  
  • why not allow Israeli farmers to increase milk production, thus allowing Tnuva to obtain the milk fat needed to make it?
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Ahead of COP27, Egypt is highly vulnerable to climate change - 0 views

qz.com/-for-climate-change-1849657612 Egypt water agriculture food land climate COP sustainability SDGs
shared by Ed Webb on 27 Oct 22 - Cached
  • Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”
  • he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.
  • Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn
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  • The Nile Delta—where agriculture employs one-fifth of the country’s workforce and is responsible for 12% of its GDP and much of its food supply—is being hammered by rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a growing shortage of water.
  • rapid urbanization and population growth
  • Climate adaptation solutions that could keep environmental problems from turning existential—fixing the battered and wasteful irrigation network, expanding affordable access to improved seeds and climate-smart farming technologies, and more effective and equitable regulation of urban development on agricultural land—are being rolled out by the government and research groups, but often slower than the pace of climate impacts. That’s left Egypt’s economy and food security exposed to growing risk.
  • “We’re really squeezed and marginalized here, and the government isn’t helping,” said one farmer down the road from Abdullah, who requested anonymity to speak frankly (with tens of thousands of political prisoners, Egypt’s restrictions on free speech are also gaining prominence ahead of COP27).
  • his children see no future in agriculture
  • Around 1805, an Ottoman general named Muhammad Ali took control of the country, and founded the dynasty of kings that would rule—eventually under British colonial supervision—for 150 years. One of Ali’s most enduring marks on the country was the establishment of the first modern network of dams and irrigation canals in the Delta, which allowed tens of thousands of new acres to come under cultivation.
  • water and land played a crucial role in Nasser’s legacy. 12% of the country’s arable land was owned by the aristocracy; Nasser nationalized this land and distributed it to about 340,000 impoverished rural families. He also further extended Ali’s irrigation network and oversaw construction of the Aswan High Dam, which brought an end to the Nile’s ancient seasonal flooding and fixed the river in its present position, with just two remaining branches forking through the Delta.
  • Egypt’s population has since more than quadrupled, to 104 million. Yet the flow of the Nile, which supplies more than 95% of the country’s water, has remained more or less constant. In the 1990s water availability fell below the international “water poverty” benchmark of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year.
  • Egypt has managed that scarcity by meticulously recycling agricultural water and, in recent years, curtailing the production of water-intensive crops like cotton and rice and importing 40% of its wheat and other food staples.
  • The population is still growing quickly, and could reach 160 million by 2050. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that is nearing completion upstream could cut the flow of Nile water into Egypt by a quarter during the as-yet-unknown number of years it will take to fill its reservoir. By 2100, climate change-related heat waves upstream could reduce the Nile’s flow by 75%, Abousabaa said.
  • rising temperatures and falling rainfall mean crops—which consume 86% of Egypt’s water supply—will require more irrigation to survive.
  • current annual demand for water is about 35% higher than what the country receives from the Nile, groundwater, and a very small amount of rain—a deficit of about 20 billion cubic meters. To cover it, she said, Egypt will need to use every drop multiple times, aggressively minimize wastage, and boost the supply by investing $2.8 billion in dozens of new desalination plants with the aim to produce 5 billion cubic meters annually by 2050.
  • On the western fringe of the Delta, farms and suburbs are gradually overtaking the desert as the central Delta grows more crowded. Here, water is even scarcer and the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. But in this and a few other desert areas around Egypt, the government is working to link more than 1.5 million acres to groundwater irrigation, and says it is about one-third of the way there. Land reclamation could take some pressure off the Delta, and sandy soils are well-suited for the production of citrus fruits that are one of Egypt’s most lucrative exports.
  • The unpredictability makes it difficult to identify solutions, Salah says: “Climate change is like a big black box.”
  • “For the last two years, with heat wave after heat wave, we lost more than half the crop. It’s really sad.”
  • The farm relies on groundwater brought up from wells on the property, and Nasrallah says the suburbs are draining the aquifer. In the last four years he has had to dig an extra thirty meters to find water—and deeper wells mean higher electricity bills for pumping. Some wells have dried up altogether. Recently, government officials told him he had to stop watering the grass on a soccer field he built for his workers.
  • Urbanization is also spreading in the inner Delta, as many farmers decide that constructing housing is more profitable than growing crops. Since the 1970s, about 14% of the Delta’s arable land has been converted to urban development
  • Individual farms are also becoming smaller with each generation as, in keeping with longstanding Egyptian custom, land is divided among a father’s heirs (with sons traditionally taking a larger share than daughters). Urban development degrades the Delta’s soil and drives more farming into the desert, leaving the entire food system more vulnerable to climate impacts. Land fragmentation leads to the inefficient use of water and other resources and raises the costs of distribution for farmers.
  • in some cases, the government’s own plans are responsible, most recently in August when thousands of people living on a Nile island near Cairo that was primarily used for farming were evicted to make way for a state-sanctioned development project.
  • The network started by Muhammed Ali now includes about 33,000 miles of delivery and drainage canals across the country, enough to wrap around the globe, that range in size from small rivers to something a child could hop over. Delta residents say they used to bathe in these canals, drink from them, and raise fish in them. Now many of them, especially at the ends of the network, are polluted with farming chemicals and sewage, and choked with trash.
  • Between seepage, evaporation, and water wasted by farmers who flood their fields instead of using controlled irrigation hoses, nearly one-third of the country’s water is lost in the irrigation system between the Aswan High Dam and the sea
  • The soil is dark and appears rich, but is crusted with a visible layer of salt, a problem that affects up to 40% of Egypt’s arable soil.
  • Fixing the irrigation network is a priority for the government. Eman Sayed from the Irrigation Ministry said her agency has lined about 3,700 miles of canals with concrete in the last two years and is aiming to finish another 12,400 in the next few years. The ministry is also helping farmers cover the cost of installing drip irrigation systems, which researchers at AUC found can cut farmers’ water consumption 61% per year; today such systems cover only one-sixth of arable land in Egypt.
  • Authorities have also begun to restrict production of water-intensive crops like rice and bananas, although farmers say there is little enforcement of these rules, and both crops are still widely cultivated throughout the Delta.
  • Egypt has made clear that COP27 will focus primarily on wringing climate finance out of the rich countries that are most responsible for climate change.
  • On the horizon, an offshore natural gas platform is visible. Egypt, which seized the disruption of Russian energy supplies to Europe because of the Ukraine war as an opening to boost its own exports of natural gas, is now contributing more to the problem than ever before; an independent review of its new climate strategy ranked it “highly insufficient” for averting disastrous levels of carbon emissions.
  • By 2100, Noureldeen says, sea level rise could inundate nearly 700 square miles of the coastal Delta and displace four million people.
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Humanitarian Aid Blocked As UN Imposes New Iran Sanctions | Common Dreams - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...15-7 Iran Iraq sanctions US USA EU nukes
shared by Ed Webb on 16 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Food and medical exports to Iran are being blocked from that country even though they are exempt from new sanctions instituted Monday by the European Union.
  • "With Iraq, that of course ended up with 500,000 Iraqi children dead, resulted in the shortage of medicine, and other needs, and ended up ultimately to forceful invasion and war,"
  • Washington-based sanctions attorney Eric Ferrari said food and medical exports to Iran are being blocked, even though those items are technically exempt from sanctions. According to the NIAC: He said he has encountered numerous scenarios—an attempted export of a $250,000 of burn medicine, a multimillion dollar export of prosthetic limbs, exports of food supplies—in which goods that had a license from the U.S. government, a willing exporter, and a willing importer, still were blocked because no foreign bank was willing to take the risk to facilitate the transaction.  The reason, he said, is that the U.S. government has announced broader and broader penalties for any foreign bank dealing with Iranian financial institutions, while making no distinction between prohibited and authorized transactions with those banks.  The result is fewer and fewer channels for legal, humanitarian, food, and medical transactions.
  • Ed Webb on 16 Oct 12
     
    Some confusion here - headine refers to UN, text refers to new EU sanctions, but also to existing US sanctions. Nevertheless, it is a matter of concern that sanctions are a blunter weapon than might appear from much media coverage and political discussion.
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Could hydroponics save Yemen from starving? | Green Prophet - 0 views

www.greenprophet.com/...onics-save-yemen-from-starving Yemen food agriculture climate UN FAO WFP UNICEF
shared by Ed Webb on 12 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The number of food insecure people in Yemen has risen by 3 million in seven months, with an estimated 17.1 million people now struggling to feed themselves
  • More than two-thirds of Yemen’s population of 27.4 million people now lack access to food and consume an inadequate diet. Another Syria-style crisis may be on our way, and climate change and lack of water is making it worse.
  • “We are witnessing some of the highest numbers of malnutrition amongst children in Yemen in recent times. Children who are severely and acutely malnourished are 11 times more at risk of death as compared to their healthy peers, if not treated on time. Even if they survive, these children risk not fulfilling their developmental potentials, posing a serious threat to an entire generation in Yemen and keeping the country mired in the vicious cycle of poverty and under development,”
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  • 80 percent of Yemenis are in now in debt, and more than half of all households have had to buy food on credit.
  • Up to 1.5 million households engaged in agriculture now lack access to critical agricultural inputs (including seeds, fertiliser, fuel for irrigation) and are in urgent need of emergency agricultural support. Of these, 860 000 households engaged in livestock production lack access to animal feed (fodder, concentrate, mineral blocks) and many livestock-dependent households have been forced to sell their herds to cater for other household needs
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UAE and the Horn of Africa: A Tale of Two Ports - 0 views

worldview.stratfor.com/...and-horn-africa-tale-two-ports hornofafrica UAE KSA Saudi Turkey China Oman France US USA Djibouti Eritrea Ethiopia Somalia Somaliland infrastructure transportation investment bases
shared by Ed Webb on 04 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • On February 22, Djibouti seized control of the Doraleh Container Terminal from its joint owner and operator, the Dubai-based DP World. The seizure was not wholly unexpected and was the culmination of Djibouti's deteriorating bilateral ties with the United Arab Emirates and a lost legal battle with DP World to renegotiate the terms of the port concession that gave it a 33 percent equity stake in 2006. The London Court of International Arbitration Tribunal ruled against Djibouti's claims, lodged in 2014, that DP World paid bribes in order to secure the 30-year concession
  • Doraleh opened in 2009 and is the only container terminal in the Horn of Africa able to handle 15,000-ton container ships. It quickly became the most important entrepot for the region's largest country and economy, Ethiopia, which was rendered landlocked by Eritrea's independence in 1993. Ethiopia receives around 97 percent of its imports through Doraleh — around 70 percent of the port's activity — in what has become an unacceptable strategic reliance on a neighbor
  • the increasingly complex dynamics animating the geopolitics, and the more localized politics, being shaped by the competition among aspiring regional powers of the Middle East — particularly Gulf Arab states and Turkey — and China for influence in the Horn of Africa
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  • A year after DP World finalized an agreement with the semiautonomous region of Somaliland to develop a $442 million commercial port in Berbera, Ethiopia inked a deal with the port operator and Somaliland's government to acquire a 19 percent stake in the port. There are reportedly plans for DP World to upgrade the connectivity infrastructure linking Berbera to the Ethiopian border that would allow Addis Ababa and potentially greater East Africa to reduce their sole dependence on Djibout
  • The intra-Gulf Cooperation Council crisis has added another destabilizing variable, as countries, parties, and elites in East Africa have been forced to choose sides
  • Along with the competition by outside players has come greater leverage for Horn of Africa countries, whose elites have long been adept at playing external patrons off one another. Ethiopia has to some degree succeeded in diluting Abu Dhabi's reliance on its enemy, Eritrea, by supporting its plans for the Berbera port. In 2015, after losing access to Djibouti for military operations, the UAE constructed a base in the coastal Eritrean city of Assab, which has been vital to its operations in southern Yemen. By supporting the UAE's military and commercial infrastructure plans in Somaliland, Ethiopia — the Horn of Africa's largest and most powerful country — also contributed to the fracturing of Somalia by encouraging the de facto consolidation of Somaliland's independence
  • In Sudan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have led efforts to rehabilitate President Omar Bashir in the international community by lobbying for U.S. sanctions on Sudan to be lifted. Bashir agreed to cut ties with Iran and send troops to fight for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen
  • Bashir also agreed to lease Turkey the Red Sea island of Suakin for development. Though Turkey has denied it, concerns quickly arose that Ankara planned to build a new military base on the island, which would be its second in the Horn of Africa with the first in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.
  • The confidence with which Horn of Africa elites are pursuing their own interests at the risk of angering new patrons underscores the high stakes for the participants in this so-called "new scramble for Africa," and also their long-term intent. Djibouti in particular emerged over the past decade as a strategic focal point next to the Bab el-Mandeb shipping lane, existential for the flow of Gulf energy to Europe and goods between Asia and Europe. It has leveraged its location for lucrative basing deals for current and emerging world powers alike. The United States, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and former colonial ruler France all have bases in Djibouti.
  • the UAE's longer-term interests — as well as those of its competitors — are economic and strategic. The country is working to make itself an essential component of China's Belt and Road Initiative and secure Dubai's Jebel Ali as the key logistics and trade hub linking Asia to Africa via DP World infrastructure, in the face of competition by a glut of new ports built by rivals with similar ambitions in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, and elsewhere along the Horn of Africa
  • ports projects in Rwanda, Mozambique, Algeria, and Mali
  • State-backed and private investors from the UAE have invested in a wide range of non-energy sectors, from finance and banking to construction, tourism, food, entertainment, and agri-business
  • The UAE is also trying to make the nature of its engagement more attractive for African governments and private sector partners: Rather than following the path of China, which has been perceived negatively as following a pseudo-colonial model in Africa, it is looking more toward the Turkish model. Investments such as DP World's in Somalia or military bases come with packages of infrastructure investment, training, and education for workers and security forces, as well as inducements such as greater numbers of visas to the UAE
  • Food and water security continues to be an important interest for the UAE and other Gulf countries in East Africa. Emirati companies are seeking to avoid the political pitfalls that have caused past investments in land for food production to fail. Privately owned Al Dahra Holding, which owns farmland in Africa, claims to use a 50-50 sharing formula for produce with local companies and hires local workers
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Qatar's agriculture push risks further groundwater depletion - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...er-environmental-concerns.html Qatar water food security agriculture sustainability environment
shared by Ed Webb on 31 Aug 19 - Cached
  • Qatar's leading news outlets recently reported that local agricultural production has jumped by 400% since a political and economic blockade was imposed on the emirate by its Arab neighbors in 2017. And within a few years, 40% to 50% of fresh products could be produced locally,
  • the blockade caused Qatar to realize its vulnerability when it comes to the food supply
  •  recently ranked as the most water-stressed country in the world. It is also one of the few countries with no permanent rivers as rainfall is extremely unpredictable and highly erratic
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  • Qatar’s fast-growing agriculture has been looking deep underground for its water.
  • Each year, 92% of the 250 million cubic meters (75,000 acre-feet) of groundwater withdrawn from the country's aquifers is given free of charge to farmers
  • At Baladna, Qatar's largest producer of fresh dairy products, 12,000 cows produce 400 tons of fresh milk and and other dairy goods a day. The company’s press officer, Saba Mohammed Nasser Al Fadala, acknowledges that "cows were not made for the desert."
  • Artificial recharges and irrigation return flows reduce this loss but also may be polluting the aquifers, in part because of chemical fertilizers used by farmers
  • groundwater depletion causes seawater intrusion into aquifers: In 2014, 69% of wells in Qatar were classified as moderately saline
  • Half of the groundwater allocated to agriculture is utilized to grow fodder that feeds 60% to 70% of the 1.6 million head of livestock in Qatar.
  • Qatar withdraws nearly four times as much water from its aquifers than is replenished by rainfall each year
  • To mitigate the depletion of Qatar’s aquifers, local authorities plan to ban the use of groundwater to grow fodder by 2025 and restrict it to vegetable crops. Treated sewage water that is currently allocated to the irrigation of green spaces, deep injection into aquifers and agriculture is to be used for fodder.
  • Freshwater reserves for Qatar are estimated at 2.5 billion cubic meters. However, an annual groundwater deficit of some 100 million cubic meters or more puts Qatar's future in a precarious situation
  • each Baladna cow requires an average of 700 liters of water a day, most of which is used for misting in Qatar's heat. The press officer said up to 80% of this water can be recycled
  • The Ministry of Municipality and Environment says it supports those who reduce their groundwater consumption and move toward hydroponic farming. A budget of $2.75 million to $3.3 million has been allocated to a program that aims to provide up to 140 farms with free greenhouses
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Can Cairo stave off discontent over soaring prices? - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...g-discontent-prices-bread.html Egypt economy food austerity IMF politics Sisi
shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • As pressure builds on Egyptian livelihoods following the devaluation of the pound and the slashing of fuel subsidies in November, some analysts are wondering if another uprising is looming on the horizon for Egypt. They warn that a new wave of unrest would be bloodier than the 2011 uprising and could spell disaster for the country, still reeling from the turbulent post-revolution transition.
  • Prices of basic food items, medicine, transport and housing have soared, prompting Egyptians to cut spending to make ends meet. The prices of some basic food items have shot up by up to 40%, according to CAPMAS, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics
  • protests broke out in at least four Egyptian provinces March 7. The demonstrations were triggered by bread shortages in some bakeries after Supply Minister Aly Moselhy announced a new bread subsidies system that he defended as “necessary to curb waste and corruption.” Hundreds of demonstrators blocked roads and cut railways in Alexandria, Giza, Kafr El Sheikh and Minya in protest at the minister’s abrupt decision to reduce the share of bread allotted to holders of paper ration cards to 500 loaves per bakery a day from the original 1,000 and 4,000 loaves (depending on the number of consumers in the bakery’s vicinity.)
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  • The decision to implement the new system was quickly reversed, however, over fears that the simmering bread crisis could provoke wider tumult. Seeking to allay citizens’ concerns that the move was a prelude to a reduction in their quotas of subsidized bread, Moselhy held a televised press conference on the day of the protests, apologizing to “all citizens who had not received bread” and asserting that their quotas would remain untouched. Promising to resolve the crisis within 48 hours, he blamed bakery owners for the crisis, hinting they were making profits off the subsidized flour they received from the government.
  • In the last six years, government spending on food and fuel subsidies has represented more than a quarter of annual government expenditure (more than the country spends on education and health services combined)
  • a thriving black market for the subsidized wheat, which is often resold by the bakeries at a profit rather than turned into bread
  • “The patience of Egyptians is wearing thin,” Cairo University political scientist Hassan Nafaa told Al-Monitor. “Despite the economic pressures they are facing, citizens have so far restrained themselves from protesting because they are weary after two revolutions. They also fear further turmoil as they see the civil wars in some of the neighboring Arab countries. But if people are hungry and if their basic needs are not met, there is likely to be another rebellion,” he warned, adding that if that happens, “It would be messy and bloody.”
  • Tensions have been simmering since the pound’s depreciation — a key requirement by the International Monetary Fund for Egypt to secure a $12 billion loan needed to finance the country’s budget deficit and shore up dwindling foreign currency reserves. Economists and analysts have lauded the flotation as “a much-needed reform that would restore investors’ confidence in the economy, helping foster growth and job creation.”
  • shrinking middle class was already struggling with flat wages, high inflation and mounting unemployment
  • Sisi’s approval ratings, which according to a poll conducted in mid-December 2016 by Baseera (Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research) fell by 50% during his second year in office
  • the weak currency is helping the economy by boosting exports and luring back tourists. A 25% increase in non-petroleum exports in January (compared with the same month last year), along with new loans from the IMF and other sources, is beefing up foreign currency reserves, according to The Economist. The weaker currency is also proving to be a blessing in disguise for local manufacturers as more consumers are opting to purchase local products, which are more affordable than their imported alternatives
  • The real test will be the government’s ability to stave off unrest that could undermine the progress made so far. Nafaa said it is possible to quell the rising anger over soaring prices “through more equitable distribution of wealth, better communication of government policies, transparency and accountability.”
  • “The government must also ease the crackdown on dissent, release detainees who have not committed terror crimes and bring more youths on board,”
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MERIP Water in the middle East 2020 - 1 views

diigo.com/0jtnfd MENA water agriculture food security WaterSecurity climate analysis economy
shared by Ed Webb on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • As a result of these climatic conditions, there is little surface water. The lines of rivers threading across the map of the region are few and far between. The arid climate also means that where there are stores of water below the surface, those aquifers are not being replenished very quickly. In some cases, aquifers are not being replenished at all; these fossil aquifers date back hundreds of thousands of years to past epochs when the region’s climate was wetter.
  • When it comes to water, the Middle East is a region of superlatives: the highest proportion of a population exposed to water stress, the least sustainable water resource use, the most water scarce region in the world. This simplistic narrative contains some truth.
  • The Middle East and North Africa also contains mountain chains where vegetation is lush and winters wet. Morocco’s Rif mountains, for example, receive over a meter of rainfall a year (for comparison, that is more than the Adirondacks). Around the Mediterranean Sea, too, climates are milder and rainfall higher. It sometimes snows in Damascus. Furthermore, even some dry parts of the region have significant water resources flowing through them, originating in wetter climes. Egypt’s southern city of Aswan, for instance, only receives 1mm of rainfall a year, but sits on the banks of the Nile, the longest river in the world. Depictions of the Middle East as water scarce, therefore, must be nuanced by an appreciation of the region’s varied geographies.
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  • The particularly high growth rates in some countries—Iraq, Bahrain and Palestine—are not matched in all countries
  • Migration and forced displacement also shape population distributions.
  • The broad characterization of the region as water scarce and people rich, on the other hand, tells a simple and powerful story. It is a story that is reinforced by a commonly used indicator, the Falkenmark Water Stress Index. This easily calculable figure is a ratio of the total renewable freshwater resources available in a country to the number of people. If the index is less than 1,000 cubic meters per capita per year, it denotes a situation of water scarcity; if it is less than 500 cubic meters per capita per year, it indicates conditions of absolute water scarcity. According to this indicator, the region does not look good. Most of the countries are facing either scarcity or absolute s car ci t y.
  • Water scarcity is not so much about how much water there is and more about what it is being used f or
  • an archetypal Malthusian narrative. Eighteenth century scholar Thomas Malthus proposed that the combination of a limited resource base, only growing at an arithmetic rate, and an expanding population, growing at a geometric rate, would inevitably lead to a point where the system’s capacity to support that population was exceeded and crisis would result. This notion, so simplistic and yet so enduring, undergirds much of the writing about water in the Middle East
  • A larger population means more people drinking, cleaning their homes and bodies, washing clothes and cooking. These daily activities do not, however, require all that much water relative to other water uses
  • n annual allocation of 20 cubic meters per capita is sufficient to cover consumption and basic hygiene needs
  • In cities like Amman and Beirut, many neighborhoods only receive running water for a few hours a day; in war-torn Yemen, millions lack access to clean water. But the lack experienced by some is more due to the inadequacy of the infrastructures for delivering potable water and removing wastewater than the insufficiency of the resource per se
  • producing more food does not always require more water. There are techniques of applying water to the soil that are less water intensive, allowing for what water specialists term “more crop per drop.”
  • Agriculture consumes the greatest amount of water by far, globally. This pattern is particularly pronounced in the Middle East, where low rainfall across much of the region makes irrigation a necessity for cultivation. Agriculture uses 85 percent of the region’s water.
  • food imports can be seen as a source of “virtual water.”
  • more about politics than population. The reason why Saudi Arabia long subsidized wheat production in the desert with water drawn from fossil aquifers, for instance, was not because it needed to produce more food for a growing population. Instead, this policy was about the government’s interest in becoming more self-sufficient so as to decrease its reliance on other countries and the associated vulnerabilities.
  • there is no direct correlation between population size and agricultural water use. Narratives of population-driven water crises should always be approached with caution
  • Many lower income residents, or people living in informal settlements, lack access to sufficient drinking water and sanitation. Populations in motion, too, can generate challenges for water managers. Refugee camps, for instance, which are amalgamations of people in spaces that were not necessarily designed to support those numbers, often struggle to provide enough water for their displaced population’s day-to-day uses.
  • Efforts to integrate climate change adaptation into water management plans are hampered by more pressing political priorities,
  • A number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa rely on transboundary water resources. The high degree of reliance is evident in an indicator known as the dependency ratio, which is the proportion of a nation’s freshwater resources—both surface and groundwater—that comes from outside that country. Syria and Iraq depend on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which rise in the mountainous region of southeastern Turkey. Egypt sources most of its water from the Nile, a river basin that spans 11 countries. Jordan’s two main surface water resources, the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, are shared with its neighbors. Israel taps into surface and groundwater resources that traverse borders with the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. Kuwait and Bahrain’s groundwater reserves are fed by water flowing laterally underground from Saudi Arabia.
  • available water resources of the Middle East and North Africa are also shifting due to anthropogenic climate change
  • Climate models are consistent in their projections that temperatures across the region are increasing and will continue to do so in coming decades. Higher temperatures mean higher evapotranspiration rates —plants, in other words, will drink more water—and larger losses from open surfaces like reservoirs. Demand from the most water intensive sector, agriculture, will increase.
  • studies suggest that the variability and uncertainty in rainfall timing and intensity is increasing
  • the rise in sea level poses a risk of coastal flooding in deltas, like that of the Shatt al-Arab, on the border of Iraq and Iran, and the Nile Delta as well as other lowlying areas along the Mediterranean coastline
  • In the case of shared aquifers, the added uncertainties surrounding groundwater volumes and flows compound the challenges.
  • despite the dramatic appeal of the idea of a water war, most scholars agree that the concept is misleading. Wars typically have much more complicated origins than a single causal factor, like water. Intrastate disputes over water may be more significant than interstate conflicts. Moreover, a shared resource does not necessarily have to be a source of tension; it can be a source of cooperation
  • Countries in the more arid parts of the Middle East have championed technologies for producing more water. The Gulf states and Israel, for instance, have been leaders in desalination. In these countries, desalinated water now meets the majority of domestic water needs
  • Many of the region’s water bodies are contaminated with sewage, agricultural chemicals and industrial waste,
  • Public awareness campaigns urge residents to conserve water, take shorter showers, turn off the faucet when brushing their teeth, not leave the water running when cleaning dishes and avoid washing their cars
  • Although initiatives are underway to develop solar-powered desalination, these projects are still in their infancy
  • These uses are so small relative to agriculture, though, that their impact is limited.
  • In many countries of the region, farmers reuse agricultural drainage water. If municipal and industrial waste is properly treated, it too can be reused
  • experts have advised authorities to raise the price of water. In most countries of the region, water is priced significantly below its cost of delivery. In some cases, it is free. Egyptian farmers, for instance, do not pay for the water they use on their fields (although they do pay other irrigation-related costs, such as energy for pumps). If they had to pay for water, economists argue, they would not use so much
  • While these measures can be effective at reducing water consumption and easing scarcity, they impose costs and can increase rural poverty without other forms of social protection and support for small farmers. They also risk ignoring the larger contextual factors that shape water use in a home, factory or farm. Policies that seek to mandate a technology, price or behavioral change for the sake of saving water, without recognizing the priorities and perspectives of those who use this water on a daily basis, are unlikely to be successful
  • the challenge of water scarcity and the experience of many within the region who struggle to find sufficient, clean water for their everyday needs and livelihoods is as much about economic priorities, social inequalities and political relations as it is a function of the region’s geography
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Romanian port struggles to handle flow of Ukrainian grain | AP News - 0 views

apnews.com/...0ec081ae0dd77e66874364766635d5 Ukraine Russia war food agriculture trade shipping BlackSea Suez mediterranean Romania
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  • With Ukraine’s seaports blockaded or captured by Russian forces, neighboring Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta has emerged as a main conduit for the war-torn country’s grain exports amid a growing world food crisis.It’s Romania’s biggest port, home to Europe’s fastest-loading grain terminal, and has processed nearly a million tons of grain from Ukraine — one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and corn — since the Feb. 24 invasion.But port operators say that maintaining, let alone increasing, the volume they handle could soon be impossible without concerted European Union support and investment.
  • Constanta’s proximity by land to Ukraine, and by sea to the Suez Canal, make it the best current route for Ukrainian agricultural exports. Other alternatives include road and rail shipments across Ukraine’s western border into Poland and its Baltic Sea ports.
  • U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization projects up to 181 million people in 41 countries could face food crisis or worse levels of hunger this year in connection with the Ukraine war.
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  • enabled the port over the past four months to ship close to a million tons of Ukrainian grain, most of it arriving by barge down the Danube River. But with 20 times that amount still blocked in Ukraine and the summer harvest season fast approaching in Romania itself and other countries that use Constanta for their exports, Dolghin said it’s likely the pace of Ukrainian grain shipping through his port will slow
  • solutions discussed in Kyiv, Iohannis said, included speeding up Danube barge shipments, increasing the speed of their unloading at Romanian ports, new border crossings for trucks with Ukrainian grain and reopening a decommissioned railway linking Romania with Ukraine and Moldova
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