A Hotter Planet Means Less On Our Plates

November 23, 2009

In the Sunday November 22, 2009 issue of Outlook in the Washington Post, Lester Brown discusses the significant implications of food security in the upcoming Copenhagen Conference.

As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants in time to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off ever more intense crop-withering heat waves before they create chaos in world grain markets?

These are all climate-change issues, but they have something else in common: food. Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat in the decades to come.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. Recent projections show that the sea could rise up to six feet this century (if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would rise by 23 feet). According to the World Bank, it would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

Melting mountain glaciers are even more worrisome. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers around the world, from the Andes to the Rockies, from the Alps to the mountain ranges of Asia. Of these, the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau threatens to shrink food supplies most sharply. Their annual ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China—the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow—during the dry season. And this water in turn supplies irrigation systems. More >>>

Center for Arms Control Praises Obama for Not Rushing U.S.-India Nuclear Agreement

WASHINGTON - November 24 - The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation praised the Obama administration today for outlining broad areas of cooperation with India and not rushing nuclear energy negotiations, which could further undermine nuclear weapons non-proliferation efforts.

The United States and India are still negotiating a subsequent arrangement that would lay out the details for whether and how the United States would give its consent to India for reprocessing U.S.-origin fuel. Reprocessing separates plutonium from nuclear waste. While India plans to use the plutonium to fuel power reactors, plutonium can also be used to make nuclear weapons. India used plutonium derived from U.S. and Canadian nuclear energy assistance intended for peaceful purposes to conduct its first nuclear weapons test in 1974. More >>>

Sy Hersh and Pakistan’s Nukes

November 19, 2009 by Michael Krepon - Seymour Hersh deserves every one of many awards for investigative journalism he has received, but not for his reporting on Pakistan, where his sourcing is weak and his conclusions are suspect.

Hersh’s latest, Defending the Arsenal, Can Pakistan’s nuclear weapons be secured? (The New Yorker, November 16, 2009) has one headline grabbing assertion:
Current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that [the Obama] Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide additional security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.
In return, Hersh says, “the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities.” More >>>

Inspectors Fear Iran Is Hiding Nuclear Plants

WASHINGTON —November 17, 2009 - International inspectors who gained access to Iran’s newly revealed underground nuclear enrichment plant voiced strong suspicions in a report on Monday that the country was concealing other atomic facilities.

The report was the first independent account of what was contained in the once secret plant, tunneled into the side of a mountain, and came as the Obama administration was expressing growing impatience with Iran’s slow response in nuclear negotiations.
In unusually tough language, the International Atomic Energy Agency appeared highly skeptical that Iran would have built the enrichment plant without also constructing a variety of other facilities that would give it an alternative way to produce nuclear fuel if its main centers were bombed. So far, Iran has denied that it built other hidden sites in addition to the one deep underground on a military base about 12 miles north of the holy city of Qum. More >>>

Poor nations vow low-carbon path

Poor countries considered vulnerable to climate change have pledged to embark on moves to a low-carbon future, and challenge richer states to match them.
The declaration from the first meeting of a new 11-nation forum calls on rich countries to give 1.5% of their GDP for climate action in the developing world.
It also calls for much tougher limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The forum was established by Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed to highlight the climate "threat" to poor nations.
The declaration contends that man-made climate change poses an "existential threat to our nations, our cultures and to our way of life, and thereby undermines the internationally protected human rights of our people".
More >>>

Land Grabs for Food Production Under Fire

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 - A move by governments and rich investors to raise food crops on farmland purchased in some of the world's poorer countries is coming under fire.

"The purchase of vast tracts of land from poor, developing countries by wealthier, food-insecure nations and private investors have become a widespread phenomenon," says a new study by the Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank based in San Francisco.

The sudden rush for these "land grabs" - prompted primarily by the global food crisis - is threatening food security and the livelihoods of some 1.5 billion small farmers worldwide, according to the study titled "The Great Land Grab", released early this week.

Between 2006 and mid-2009, some 37 million to 49 million acres of farmland have changed hands or are under negotiation. More >>>

Read the International Land Coalition Paper - Increasing commercial pressure on land: Building a coordinated response.

THE COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE ON FOOD SECURITY

For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely.

For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought.

For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry.
This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security. 


We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century. 



The world rice harvest is particularly vulnerable to rising sea level. More >>>