Science just served up a double coupon for the argumentative: A new study suggests that climate change is driving a Middle East conflict that brought the Islamic State to prominence.
Year: 2015
Mandating food insecurity: The global impacts of rising biofuel mandates and targets
Expanding demand for biofuels, fed significantly by government policies mandating rising levels of consumption in transportation fuel, has been strongly implicated in food price increases and food price volatility most recently seen in 2008 and 2011-2012. First-generation biofuels, made from agricultural crops, divert food directly to fuel markets and divert land, water and other food-producing resources from their current or potential uses for production of feed for animals and food for human consumption.
Boko Haram violence displaces 1.2 million Nigerians
The DTM report said 1,188,018 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe and Taraba states. A further 47,276 are sheltering further south in Plateau, Nasarawa, Kano, Kaduna, and the federal capital, Abuja. According to the report, 92 percent of the IDPs have been made homeless by the jihadist insurgency – the majority of them fled in 2014, a reflection of Boko Haram’s strategy of seizing towns and villages.
Study says pregnant women in India are dangerously underweight
NEW DELHI — Her first child survived eight months before succumbing to pneumonia; her second was stillborn; her third, delivered in a rickshaw, gasped for an hour before dying.
Death by chocolate: the sugar-fueled diabetes surge in South Asia
The midweek buffet lunch at a fashionable vegetarian restaurant in Bengaluru was delicious but unexceptional until the dessert arrived one table over. It levitated on a cloud of cardamom smoke, hissing loudly: the sizzling chocolate cake, drowning in chocolate syrup, the size of a dinner plate. Actually two. One for each twentysomething computer techie. Both finished the whole thing.
Will sustainable palm oil surge exclude small farmers?
Among Ghana’s small-scale farmers, there’s a saying that if your cocoa crop fails, you may as well go back and tend your oil palm.That’s because oil palm is more resistant to pests and diseases, and provides a regular harvest throughout the year – as long as it is looked after properly, which is rare, according to Rosemary Addico who runs a program supporting farmers.
Where and why food prices lead to social upheaval
Between 2000 and 2011, prices for most globally traded commodities more than doubled. Since cresting in early 2011, however, oil and industrial metals prices have halved. As the saying goes, however: What’s that got to do with the price of eggs? Not much. 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.
As Walmart gives raises, other employers may have to go above minimum wage
Walmart is the biggest private employer in America, with 1.3 million United States workers. And many of them will soon see a raise, in the latest snippet of corporate news that suggests a firmer job market is starting to enable workers to successfully demand higher pay.
Battle to feed the world pits small farmers against big agriculture. Do small-scale farmers hold the key to fulfilling global goals on hunger and poverty? Or can they only be achieved by large-scale agriculture?
Dotted along the narrow path that skirts the edge of Beatrice Alvitsa’s house in Shimanyiro, a green Kenyan valley near the border with Uganda, are dozens of millet plants, each protected by a carefully assembled fence made of sticks. “These keep the chickens and other animals out,” she says, bending down to mend a break in one of the fences.
Emergency aid projects in Iraq face closure due to funding shortfall
In the last year more than 2.2million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes due to fighting between militants calling themselves the Islamic State and government security forces and are scattered across the country, many in tented camps and makeshift shelters.
