Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 21 May 2011
Drought from Paris, France to Paris, Texas has farmers and grain dealers looking upwards. The farmers are looking to the skies for rain and the dealers are wondering where rising grain prices are going to stop.
 Wheat belts show signs of irreversible drought damage U.S. wheat prices are on their way to their biggest weekly gain and European benchmark wheat futures have jumped just under 30 percent in the past nine weeks as wheat belts on both sides of the Atlantic show signs of irreversible drought damage.
“We need Mother Nature’s help to save a crop, which whatever happens will be mediocre,” said a senior European trader, referring to France, the EU’s biggest wheat producer.
An unusually dry and hot spring in top EU wheat producers and severe dryness in U.S. states Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, have revived memories of the dry summer of 2010, which ravaged Russian and Ukrainian wheat harvests and choked off supplies from the key exporters.
Food security is a global concern and the UN’s food body has issued repeated warnings about food price inflation since last year’s Black Sea drought.
Rising food prices helped fuel the unrest which toppled the heads of Egypt and Tunisia earlier this year, triggering protests in many Arab countries.
Black Sea wheat may this year go some way to meeting lost production from EU and U.S. fields but governments and consumers anxious to secure reliable food supplies will be sensitive to anything that threatens the flow of grain. Continue reading Paris to Paris drought
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 06 May 2011
The world’s rising temperature is slowing production of major food crops, and as global warming continues, the trend will significantly disrupt the economies of many countries and impair the health of their people, Stanford researchers say.
 A single degree increase in global temperature can result in a 5 percent drop in the world's production of corn If the impact is to be averted, farmers in many parts of the world will have to change the types of crops they grow, and the planting of many crops – particularly corn and wheat – will have to be shifted to regions where they are not now grown.
The findings are the result of a detailed global study of climate change and its links to food production by the Stanford group, together with a Columbia University economist, who looked closely at the past 30 years of production for four of the world’s major food crops – corn, wheat, rice and soybeans.
Rice, soybeans stable
They found that only rice and soybean crops have remained relatively unaffected by climate change. But global corn production was nearly 4 percent lower than it might have been if that warming trend hadn’t existed, and the world’s wheat crop was 5.5 percent lower than normal. The decreased output may well be responsible for a 6 percent rise in global prices for those two food crops over the three decades, they found. Continue reading Rising temperature slows global major food production
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 28 April 2011
By: Aaron Maasho
More than two million Ethiopians are in need of food aid due to drought caused by one of the worst La Nina weather phenomenon in a decade, the United Nations said.
 Oromiya Region, Ethiopia. Photo by Andrew Heavens La Nina, which was blamed for Australia’s floods this year, is an abnormal cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean that wreaks havoc with weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region, and has brought poor rains to the Horn of Africa.
The U.N. humanitarian affairs office (UNOCHA) said the March-May rainy season had largely failed in Ethiopia’s lowland areas, and appealed for $75 million in food and other assistance to meet the needs of two million people.
“Pasture and traditional water sources un-replenished by rains have been depleted in most of the affected areas,” UNOCHA said in a report released late on Wednesday.
“Animal body conditions are declining rapidly, resulting in lower livestock prices at market even as the price of staple cereals is increasing.”
An additional one million people are also seeking relief aid throughout Ethiopia — one of the world’s largest recipients of foreign aid, receiving more than $3 billion in 2008, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). Continue reading Ethiopians in need of food aid due to La Nina
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 12 April 2011
Farming is moving indoors, where the sun never shines, where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right.
 Indoor rice field in Tokyo. The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.
Advocates say this, or something like it, may be the answer to the world’s food problems.
“In order to keep a planet that’s worth living on, we have to change our methods,” says Gertjan Meeuws of PlantLab, a private research company.
The world is already having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on earth live in cities, and nearly half of those – about 3 billion – are hungry or malnourished.
Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilise, harvest and transport produce.
And prices will only get more unstable. Climate change makes long-term crop planning uncertain.
Farmers in many parts of the world already are draining available water resources to the last drop.
And the world is getting more crowded: by mid-century, the global population will grow from 6.8 billion to 9 billion, the UN predicts.
To feed so many people may require expanding farmland at the expense of forests and wilderness, or finding ways to radically increase crop yields. Continue reading Indoor farming may solve world food problem
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 10 March 2011
More than a dozen factors, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the world-wide spread of pests and air pollution, may be behind the emerging decline of bee colonies across many parts of the globe.
 Of the 100 crop species that provide 90% of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees Scientists are warning that without profound changes to the way human-beings manage the planet, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue.
• New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens—which can be deadly to bees and other key pollinating insects—are now being detected world-wide, migrating from one region to another as a result of shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade
• Meanwhile an estimated 20,000 flowering plant species, upon which many bee species depend for food, could be lost over the coming decades unless conservation efforts are stepped up
• Increasing use of chemicals in agriculture, including ‘systemic insecticides’ and those used to coat seeds, is being found to be damaging or toxic to bees. Some can, in combination, be even more potent to pollinators, a phenomenon known as the ‘cocktail effect’
• Climate change, left unaddressed, may aggravate the situation, in various ways including by changing the flowering times of plants and shifting rainfall patterns. This may in turn affect the quality and quantity of nectar supplies. Continue reading Global bee colonies continue to collapse
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