Valeriya Teplova 201360 Fall: Composition II (03) Instructor: Heidi Skurat Harris

Global Food Crisis

I need do a paper for Global Issues class, so I was doing research. And I saw a lot of pictures with this tiny children that are almost translucent. It took my breath away! I knew that we have hunger in the world, but I did not think that it that grievously. So this was my start of researching about global food crisis and questions that relate to it. As the global economic crisis deepens, hunger and malnutrition are likely to increase. Reduced incomes and higher unemployment mean the purchasing power of the poor diminishes. Already, more and more people are finding food is out of reach. Why is hunger went so bad? Why we cant stop it? What we can do to help? These questions was in my head and I tried to find the answers.
I found article on NYtimes site that calls Our Coming Food Crisis, where author wrote about tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif. Situated in Death Valley. According Gary Paul Nabhan It last made news in 1913, when it set the record for the worlds hottest recorded temperature, at 134 degrees. With the heat wave currently blanketing the Western states, and given that the mercury there has already reached 130 degrees, the news media is awash in speculation that Furnace Creek could soon break its own mark. Because of weather changes the number of natural disasters in the world has doubled since the mid-1990s. In this sense, we see the human face of climate change every day.

Such speculation, though, misses the real concern posed by the heat wave, which covers an area larger than New England. The problem isnt spiking temperatures, but a new reality in which long stretches of triple-digit days are common threatening not only the lives of the millions of people who live there, but also a cornerstone of the American food supply. People living outside the region seldom recognize its immense contribution to American agriculture: roughly 40 percent of the net farm income for the country normally comes from the 17 Western states; cattle and sheep production make up a significant part of that, as do salad greens, dry beans, onions, melons, hops, barley, wheat and citrus fruits. The current heat wave will undeniably diminish both the quality and quantity of these foods. The most vulnerable crops are those that were already in flower and fruit when temperatures surged, from apricots and barley to wheat and zucchini. Idaho farmers have documented how their potato yields have been knocked back because their heat-stressed plants are not developing their normal number of tubers. Across much of the region, temperatures on the surface of food and forage crops hit 105 degrees, at least 10 degrees higher than the threshold for most temperate-zone crops. Whats more, when food and forage crops, as well as livestock, have had to endure temperatures 10 to 20 degrees higher than the long-term averages, they require far more water than usual. The Western drought, which has persisted for the last few years, has already diminished both surface water and groundwater supplies and increased energy costs, because of all the water that has to be pumped in from elsewhere. If these costs are passed on to consumers, we can again expect food prices, especially for beef and lamb, to rise, just as they did in 2012, the hottest year in American history. So extensive was last years drought that more than 1,500 counties about half of all the counties in the country

 were declared national drought disaster areas, and 90 percent of those were hit by heat waves as well. The answer so far has been to help affected farmers with payouts from crop insurance plans. But while we can all sympathize with affected farmers, such assistance is merely a temporary response to a long-term problem. They told about two strategies.
One strategy would be to promote the use of locally produced compost to increase the moistureholding capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards. In addition to locking carbon in the soil, composting buffers crop roots from heat and drought while increasing forage and food-crop yields. By simply increasing organic matter in their fields from 1 percent to 5 percent, farmers can increase water storage in the root zones from 33 pounds per cubic meter to 195 pounds. Second, we need to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles to using small- and medium-scale rainwater harvesting and gray water (that is, waste water excluding toilet water) on private lands, rather than funneling all runoff to huge, costly and vulnerable reservoirs behind downstream dams. Both urban and rural food production can be greatly enhanced through proven techniques of harvesting rain and biologically filtering gray water for irrigation. However, many state and local laws restrict what farmers can do with such water. Moreover, the farm bill should include funds from the Strikeforce Initiative of the Department of Agriculture to help farmers transition to forms of perennial agriculture initially focusing on

edible tree crops and perennial grass pastures rather than providing more subsidies to biofuel production from annual crops. And no one can reasonably argue that the current system offers farmers any long-term protection. Last year some farmers made more from insurance payments than from selling their products, meaning we are dangerously close to subsidizing farmers for not adapting to changing

climate conditions. In this peace we see how everything is connected to each other and if something went wrong, it leads to global imbalances in whole world, its affect a lot.
And climate is a key element in hunger emergencies such as the one in the Horn of Africa. The article I found on site (unicefusa.org) was telling about Progress at Risk in the Horn of Africa. A

year ago today, the crisis in the Horn of Africa reached a boiling point when the United Nations declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia. Extraordinary international support helped save countless lives in Eastern Africa and reverse the famine in Somalia. However, the crisis is far from over. Eight million people across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya are still in need of humanitarian assistance. Children, in particular, are threatened by a combination of poverty, insecurity, malnutrition, and disease. The Horn of Africa's famine isn't just the weather's fault. It has three main causes: drought, high food costs, and violent political instability. These are familiar factors in almost any famine, but this current crisis in East Africa is so dire because each of its causes is individually extreme.

Then I recognized that hungry people are angry people, and angry people bring governments down. War always has a destroying impact on the environment and, more specifically, the agriculture. And I found article by Sofie Utne representing Somalia from Traverse City West High School. Many conflicts today takes place in rural areas, where farmers are victims. Here, local seed systems may come under stress or even collapse, either directly or indirectly. This leads to big problems; it jeopardizes immediate food needs and threatens the very sustainability of local agriculture. That means serious consequences for the variety of genetic resources which is critical for the long-term survival. For the formal varieties, the supply of seed may dry up in

times of war. Transport routes could be disrupted, or pesticides and fertilizers needed to grow may be unavailable. In Somalia, agriculture is the backbone of the country. 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture, and it contributed to more than 80 percent of the total export of the country before civil war mainly consisting on livestock, bananas, vegetables and other fruits. During the civil war, agriculture declined more than 80 percent due to lack of security, lack of agricultural inputs and lack of relevant agricultural technology coupled with pests and diseases . Unfortunately, this year's harvest has been very poor, and fighting among the country's clans has affected the situation even worse. The government of Somalia is committed in helping the rural poor. Its policy towards agriculture is to eliminate all forms of governmental intervention in the agricultural sector and the sector will be governed by market forces. The role of the state will be confirmed to conducting agriculture research and extension services as well as developing and implementing agricultural policies and legislation. Somalia has a great challenge regarding reconstruction and rehabilitation of the country, which was devastated by the civil war. The government of Somalia can only achieve its goal if it gets optimum support from the international community. If summarise you can tell that impacts on countries from war is huge. Especially if the country is big on agriculture. During war the workforce can be destroyed. It ruins their land if it is burned, neglected, poisoned, or there are land mines in the fields. Also, farmers were sometimes drafted to be soldiers for war, so they were taken away from producing foods. Oil fields and structures are destroyed. The water and air gets polluted. Man and animals are killed. Warfare absolutely corrupts a country's agriculture when it's bad enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.unicefusa.org/work/emergencies/horn-of-africa/ http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/466546a.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/globalfoodcrisis/