Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch passes along this World Food Program video from Chad, "ground zero of the Sahel food crisis".

London-based journalist Neal mann is in Burkina Faso, where children are eating the leaves off trees to survive. You can follow his social media posts from his journey here.

Now, ask yourself why footage from across West Africa isn't on your nightly news, every night.

Grace Livingstone | Apr 4

The Independent - Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world's poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations' leading expert on food.

Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers. Purely financial players, for example, account for 61 per cent of investment on the wheat futures market, according to the World Development Movement report Broken Markets.

Speculative investment in agricultural commodities in 2011 was 20 times the amount spent by all countries on agricultural aid. Goldman Sachs, the largest player in the agricultural commodities market, earned £600m from food speculation in 2009, and Barclays Capital, the world's third-largest player and largest British bank in this market, earned up to £340m in 2010, according to the report. Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital declined to comment.

Before it was deregulated in the year 2000, the agricultural commodities futures market was used mainly by farmers and food buyers seeking to insure themselves against changes in the prices of products such as wheat, maize and sugar. When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

Johannesburg | Feb 28

The Guardian - Cassava is "the Rambo of food crops", and could be the best bet for African farmers threatened by climate change, scientists claim.

Cassava is the second most important source of carbohydrate in sub-Saharan African, after maize. It is eaten by about 500 million people every day.

The root becomes even more productive in hotter temperatures, growing in poor soil and without water, scientists said. It outperformed potatoes, maize, beans, bananas, millet and sorghum in tests using a combination of 24 climate prediction and crop suitability models.

The scientists producing the research were from the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture and the Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security Research Program. Their findings were published on Monday in a special edition of the scientific journal Tropical Plant Biology.

"Cassava is a survivor; it's like the Rambo of the food crops," said climate scientist Andy Jarvis, the report's lead author. "It deals with almost anything the climate throws at it. It thrives in high temperatures, and if drought hits it simply shuts down until the rains come again. There's no other staple out there with this level of toughness."

how come this slow poisoning is still allowed?
(Silly me! Because it's profitable, of course!)

The chemicals are killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Seoul | Feb 21

AFP - North Korea's delegation left for talks about its nuclear programme with the United States Tuesday, in what will be the first significant contact by the two sides since the death of leader Kim Jong-Il.

The team headed by First Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan departed to attend "high-level talks" with the US, the state news agency said in a one-sentence report.

Kim will meet Glyn Davies, coordinator for US policy on North Korea, in Beijing Thursday for discussions expected to provide clues about policy directions under Pyongyang's new leaders.

The bilateral meeting will be the third since last July. The two sides had been scheduled to meet in December but the plan was shelved after Kim's death on December 17.

Kim's youngest son Jong-Un has taken over but the regime has warned the world not to expect major policy changes.

Paul valleley | Feb 1

The Independent - A quarter of young children around the world are not getting enough nutrients to grow properly, and 300 die of malnutrition every hour, according to a new report that lays bare the effects of the global food crisis.

There are 170 million children aged under five whose development has been stunted by malnutrition because of lack of food for them and their breastfeeding mothers, and the situation is getting significantly worse, according to research by the charity Save the Children.

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Peru and Nigeria – countries which are the home of half of the world's stunted children – recent rises in global food prices are forcing the parents of malnourished children to cut back on food and pull children out of school to work.

According to the report, A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition, a third of parents surveyed said their children routinely complain they do not have enough to eat. One in six parents can never afford to buy meat, milk or vegetables. It suggests that six out of 10 children in Afghanistan are not getting enough nutrients to avoid stunted growth.

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

Many of us are thinking about the changes we want to make this year. For some, these changes will be financial; for others, physical or spiritual. But for all of us, there are important resolutions we can make to “green” our lives. Although this is often a subject focused on by industrialized nations, people in developing countries can also take important steps to reduce their growing environmental impact.

I'd be very interested in hearing some informed comment in regards to 'just in time' inventory management systems and how they relate to food production and distribution, especially in wake of a bona-fide disaster in the United States. I, personally, think the danger is higher than we imagine but less than catastrophic. My biggest fear is that the systems are not terribly robust and do not have any kind of redundancy built into them.

This is fine as it goes, but I think there is a bigger concern you missing here and it only tangentially related to JIT.

In my professional lifetime I have watched businesses change from a paper system to an internet only business to business systems in many industries. What happens, for example, in the event of some kind of attack on out national IT infrastructure? I remember very clearly what happened to the internet on the day of 9/11 as one of the largest and most trafficked switches in the United States was located in WTC. There were serious robust/bandwidth issues. Now, imagine two or three switches being knocked off? What happens to both the 'just in time' nature of deliveries, coupled with the fact that the electronic infrastructure underlying JIT was knocked out? The paper-trail skills have been largely lost--all the employees with that kind of knowledge were cashiered long ago. So, I'd be very interested in hearing more about this by people in the know.

Update: One expert who follows the issue closely is retired Air Force Col. Chet Richards. I asked him in an email exchange if he would kindly address my questions and he did so. HIs reply is after the break. Also, please be sure to read all the comments in this thread. It is very, very enlightening.

More after the jump.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

World grain production fell in 2010, exacerbating a global food situation already plagued by rising prices, according to new research published by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online publication. Despite record rice and maize yields around the world, global wheat production dropped substantially enough to bring total grain output to just below 2008 levels.

David Cohen | Oct 24

BBC - Mark Post has been given €300,000 to make a hamburger, in one year. Easy money, you might think, but try doing that without using meat that has come from an animal.

Professor Post is one of the few people on the planet who can. As head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, he is in the vanguard of a new wave of research to create a way of producing meat that cuts out the need for animal husbandry altogether.

Instead of getting meat from animals raised in pastures, he wants to grow steaks in lab conditions, directly from muscle stem cells. If successful, the technology will transform the way we produce food. "We want to turn meat production from a farming process to a factory process," he explained.

count me out

. . . misguided attempt to fix our industrial food production problems, is what this is. Foie Gras and veal are ethically debatable food practices. But it strikes me that the activists use of time and energy to focus on this one practice is extraordinarily short-sided, especially when there are so many other abuses in our regular food production processes. Our daily diets are littered with obscenely unethical and extremely unhealthy practices here in America.

Sarah Morrison | Oct 2

The Independent - What began as one town's experiment with reducing its reliance on oil has now spread to 35 countries around the globe

Its founder believes it is our best hope for a future after the worldwide banking crisis. Now, it seems, a growing number of people are starting to agree. The "Transition" movement has grown eightfold since the recession hit three years ago and is now operating in 35 countries around the world.

When the first Transition town was established five years ago in Totnes, Devon, the "experiment" was simple. Like-minded people would work on creating a more sustainable community to reduce their dependency on oil. By 2008, there were 100 registered initiatives in 11 countries. Today, there are more than 850 Transitions in three times as many countries. More than 300 groups have signed up in the past year.

Transition now operates in countries including Latvia, Thailand, Nigeria, India and the US. Recent projects have sprung up in favelas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the newest initiative to be registered is from Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.

To its founder, Rob Hopkins, the reason for this explosive growth is obvious. "Communities are realising they are more vulnerable, and the current situation means people are less complacent about where the economic activity of the future is going to come from," he says. "Transition doesn't wait for permission to get started; it is about ordinary people making things happen within a bigger strategic context."

The movement is not without its critics, whether lambasted for not being radical enough, for a lack of practical guidance, or for failing to appeal to those outside the white, middle-class demographic. Much of the criticism has come from within sustainability circles themselves. Transition is proudly "apolitical" and while it works with local government, it stays clear of lobbying Parliament. But, for some, this is its major flaw.

There are some disturbing things about the listeria outbreak in cantaloupes. First, it's the first known outbreak of listeria in cantaloupes. Which raises the question: are the vectors of disease widening due to our industrial scale agriculture? What's the evidence for it?

Second: apparently a couple of hundred people a year die from listeria. So, is this really news? Again, the AP story says " the outbreak has caused at least 72 illnesses and up to 16 deaths, in 18 states, making it the deadliest food outbreak in the country in more than a decade."

What are some of the other outbreaks in the last decade? Are they rising in frequency? Holding steady? Again, I don't know the answers.

And ultimately, are the causes of said outbreaks a due to a change in regulatory policy, a reduction in enforcement and inspection funding or a combination of both? Or something else?

I don't have the answers, but I'm curious to know what they are. I've written in the past about food safety issues. The gist of what I've been saying is this: the continued assault on institutions in DC by the Republicans is a real threat to things like food safety. It makes a certain amount of sense to claim that reductions in regulations and funding for food safety programs will create a rise in outbreaks like the current listeria outbreak. That's my claim. But it's only that: a claim.

New Delhi | Sept 22

AFP - Obese people now outnumber the hungry globally, but hardship for the undernourished is increasing amid a growing food crisis, the International Federation of the Red Cross warned Thursday.

The Geneva-based humanitarian group focused on nutrition in its annual World Disasters Report, released in New Delhi, seeking to highlight the disparity between rich and poor, as well problems caused by a recent spike in prices.

In statistics used to underline the unequal access to food, the IFRC stressed there were 1.5 billion people suffering obesity worldwide last year, while 925 million were undernourished.

"If the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 percent of humanity are hungry while 20 percent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere," secretary general Bekele Geleta said in a statement.

Asia-Pacific director Jagan Chapagain called it a "double-edged scandal" at a press conference in the Indian capital, adding that "excess nutrition now kills more than hunger."

The problem of hunger existed not because there was a lack of food globally, he stressed, but because of poor distribution, wastage and rising prices that made food unaffordable.

Food prices have spiked globally in 2011, raising fears of a re-run of the crisis seen in 2008 which led to riots and political instability in many countries.

Ethan A. Huff, staff writer | 2011,September 09

Natural News - "Now that EPA has declared hay a pollutant, every farmer and rancher that stores hay, or that leaves a broken hay bale in the field, is potentially violating EPA rules and subject to an EPA enforcement action," responded Callicrate. "How far are we going to let this agency go before we stand up and do something about it?"

. . . Don Henry Ford, Jr. earlier this summer one of his main concerns was the reliance farmers have on chemical fertilizers. Not only is petroleum critical to our agriculture, but also other ingredients like potash and phosphorus. We're running out of both.

Seriously, the fox is now guarding the henhouse.

McClatchy Newspapers, By Tim Johnson, August 17

Chapingo, Mexico — At this time of year, when corn grows high, some farmers go into their fields hoping that a disease has infected their crops.

They inspect for swollen husks, a telltale sign that a parasitic fungus has spread into a spongy iridescent mass inside the ears.

The farmers are pleased, for the fungus is one of the greatest delicacies of the Mexican kitchen. It's been called the Mexican truffle, and a "food of the gods." The unique, earthy taste has been part of local cuisine since Aztec times.

August 19

NewBusinessEthiopia - Production of cassava, which is one of the world's most important food crops, is precarious and could be toppled by a perfect storm of pests and diseases, according to a new study by scientists at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Threats to cassava production: known and potential geographic distribution of four key biotic constraints, just published in the journal Food Security, identifies hotspots around the cassava-producing world where conditions are right for outbreaks of some of the crop’s most formidable enemies: whitefly, green mite, cassava mosaic disease and cassava brown streak disease.

Cassava is the third-most important food crop in the tropics after rice and maize, and is consumed daily by up to one billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Prized for its ability to thrive in harsh conditions; cassava produces its carbohydrate-rich roots in poor soils, even in times of drought. Industrial cassava production is also a crucial source of income for hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Women account for 75 percent of the agricultural producers in sub-Saharan Africa, but the majority of women farmers are living on only $1.25 per day, according to researchers from the Worldwatch Institute.

Despite the challenging circumstances that women in developing countries face, important innovations in communications and organizing are helping women play a key role in the fight against hunger and poverty. "Access to credit, which provides women farmers with productive inputs and improved technologies, can be an effective tool in improving livelihoods in Africa and beyond," said Worldwatch Institute's executive director Robert Engelman.

Worldwatch researchers traveled to 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa to meet with more than 350 farmers groups, NGOs, government agencies, and scientists, highlighting innovations, such as better extension and communication services, that are helping farmers improve their livelihoods. The findings are documented in the recently released report, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

Nourishing the Planet highlights four innovations that can strengthen women’s agricultural capacity: providing microfinance credit, providing access to the global market, providing extension services, and providing organizational support to women’s projects. more after the jump

Anthony Todd | Aug 16

The Chicago Suntimes - “Clean your plate; there are children starving in China!”

Your parents’ old saying has become a cliche, but they were on the right track, even if we questioned their reasoning.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a staggering one-third of the food produced in the world is wasted, rather than consumed. In North America, more than 20 percent of all meat is wasted. Some of that meat spoils before it can be distributed and some is damaged by bad handling, but more than half is simply wasted by restaurants, grocery stores and consumers.

What does that mean for Chicago? Based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 8 billion pounds of edible meat is wasted each year in the United States — approximately 7.5 million chickens, cows and pigs in Chicago alone, gone.

“With more than a billion people going hungry in the world, that’s a huge problem,” says Danielle Nierenberg of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C., environmental research organization.

The average American family wastes more than $600 worth of food a year, according to a 2004 study by the University of Arizona.

Suzanne Goldenberg | Whitten, Iowa | Aug 15

The Guardian - As Congress reviews 30 years of corn ethanol subsidies, the global food crisis has shone a negative light on biofuel production

There were times when Arlyn Schipper could almost feel heroic on his family farm in the heart of America's corn belt.

His 1,619 hectares (4,000 acres) in Iowa, planted almost entirely with corn, were helping to feed a nation – or at least help put fuel in its gas tanks, as his crop was processed into corn ethanol.

Schipper still sees it that way. It is just he feels America has moved on, or as he put it: "The country has turned on us."
..
For farmers like Schipper, and ethanol refiners, there will be little reason to mourn the end of the subsidy, arguing that the money went directly to the oil industry anyway.

. . . when the food they buy at the store makes them sick? Many say they'll start buying local food, farmer's market food. But this reminds me of something Don Henry Ford told me (I'm paraphrasing) when I visited him last month: how do you know that food won't make you sick either? How do you know someone at the Farmer's Market isn't taking shortcuts? Or using the right ingredients when making homemade cheese? It's a crazy paradox, because on a macro level regulations are critical, but on a micro level self-regulation is essential. The farmer that sells bad food will be known for it. Such is life.

The trend of international land grabbing—when governments and private firms invest in or purchase large tracts of land in other countries for the purpose of agricultural production and export—can have serious environmental and social consequences, according to researchers at the Worldwatch Institute. Deals that focus solely on financial profit can leave rural populations more vulnerable and without land, employment opportunities, or food security.