WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

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kmaherali
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India bans most wheat exports, adding to concerns of global food insecurity.

Post by kmaherali »

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Unloading wheat grain at a wholesale market near Amritsar, India, last month.Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, has banned exports of the grain with some exceptions, a move that could compound a worldwide shortfall worsened by the war in Ukraine and exacerbate an already dire forecast for hunger across the globe.

The war has interrupted wheat production in Ukraine and Russia, which are major suppliers. Fighting and blockades in the Black Sea have disrupted transport of the grain. And poor harvests in China, along with a heat wave in India and drought in other countries, have further snarled global supply.

India has about 10 percent of the world’s grain reserves, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture, a large surplus resulting from its heavy subsidizing of its farmers. It has been seen for months as a country that could help make up for global supply shortages.

The wheat export ban, announced in a Commerce Ministry notice dated Friday, appeared to be an about-face from earlier statements from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Indian leader told President Biden in April that the country was ready to supply the world from its reserves. He also urged domestic wheat producers to seize the opportunity, saying that Indian officials and financial institutions should support exporters.

But agricultural experts said that an ongoing heat wave and rising temperatures could affect the harvest this year, which could be a factor in why the government changed course and imposed a ban on the exports.

The Commerce Ministry notice on Friday said that wheat exports were immediately banned, with some exceptions, because a sudden spike in the crop’s price had threatened India’s food security. Limited exports will be allowed at the request of individual governments whose own food supply is vulnerable, the notice said.

The export ban could be a further blow to international organizations working to counter the increasing threat of widespread hunger. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency, has warned that an additional 47 million people could go hungry as the war’s ripple effects add to an existing crisis of steep increases in food prices and a fertilizer shortage.

In early May, the agency’s chief economist, Arif Husain, said that it was in discussions with India to tap into its stockpile to alleviate the shortage. He also said that the World Food Program had urged nations not to enact export bans because they could raise prices and reduce availability. “Hopefully, countries are listening,” he said.

Ashok Gulati, a prominent agricultural economist in India, said the ministry’s announcement reflected poorly on India, given that it contradicted the government’s previous comments about wanting to supply wheat to countries in need.

“If there is a global surge, you can tame it by opening, rather than closing down borders,” Mr. Gulati said.

The move is also likely to be unpopular among India’s farmers.

Ranbeer Singh Sirsa, a farmer in Punjab State, said the ban was likely to affect wheat farmers who had benefited recently from higher prices and demand.

“If the price wants to go up, let it settle at the international price,” Mr. Sirsa said. “Who are they trying to protect now, at the cost of farmers?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Poor Countries Face a Mounting Catastrophe Fueled by Inflation and Debt

Post by kmaherali »

Russia’s war in Ukraine is combining with a global tightening of credit and an economic slowdown in China to sow misery in low- and middle-income countries.

Before war ravaged Yemen, Walid Al-Ahdal did not worry about feeding his children. At his hometown near the Red Sea, his family grew corn, raised goats and relied on their own cow for milk.

But for the last four years, after fighting forced them to flee, their home has been a tent at a camp with 9,000 other families outside the capital city of Sana. Mr. Al-Ahdal has struggled to buy adequate food with his wages as a janitor at a hospital.

Now another war — this one more than 2,000 miles away — has upended their lives again. Food prices are soaring. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the cost of wheat has more than doubled, while milk has climbed by two-thirds.

On many nights, Mr. Al-Ahdal, 25, has nothing to feed his 2-year-old daughter and his three boys, ages 3, 5 and 6. He consoles them with tea and sends them to bed.

“My heart hurts every time my child looks for food that is not there,” Mr. Al-Ahdal said. “But what can I do?”

The hunger gnawing at families in war-torn countries like Yemen highlights a broader crisis confronting billions of people in the world’s less-affluent economies as the consequences of Russia’s assault on Ukraine are compounded by other challenges — the continuing pandemic, a global tightening of credit and a slowdown in China, the second-largest economy after the United States.

“It’s like wildfires in all directions,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “This is much bigger than after the global financial crisis. Everything is stacked against the low- and middle-income countries.”

Sanctions imposed on Russia, a major oil and gas exporter, have constrained the supply of energy, sending prices skyward and limiting economic growth, especially in countries heavily dependent on imports.

High energy prices are at the center of diminished expectations for global economic growth, now estimated at 3.6 percent this year compared with 6.1 percent last year, according to a forecast from the International Monetary Fund.

More than 14 million people are now on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to the International Rescue Committee — the result of a terrible drought combined with the pandemic and shortfalls of grains from Russia and Ukraine. The two countries are collectively the source for one-fourth of the world’s exports of wheat.

Last week, as India banned exports of most of its wheat, concerns deepened. India is the world’s second-largest wheat producer and holds abundant reserves.

The war in Ukraine threatens to impede the humanitarian response, lifting by as much as 16 percent the prices of components like peanuts that are blended into a therapeutic paste used to treat children facing life-threatening levels of malnutrition, UNICEF warned on Monday.

This catastrophe is unfolding as the pandemic continues to assail health systems, depleting government resources, and as the Federal Reserve and other central banks raise interest rates to choke off inflation. That is prompting investors to abandon lower-income countries while moving funds into less risky assets in wealthy economies.

This tidal shift in the flow of money has lifted the U.S. dollar while pushing down the value of currencies from India to South Africa to Brazil, making their imports more expensive. Tighter credit is also increasing borrowing costs for heavily indebted governments.

Not least, China, long the engine of growth for many countries, has become a significant source of drag. As the Chinese government extends lockdowns to enforce its zero-Covid policy, the result is weaker demand for raw materials, parts and finished goods shipped to China from around the globe.

“I look at a perfect storm developing in places like Yemen, and many other places around the world,” said Philippe Duamelle, the UNICEF representative for Yemen. “Families have terrible choices to make.”

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/busi ... 778d3e6de3
The most direct repercussions are seen in the rising prices of cooking fuel, fertilizer and staple foods like wheat, disrupting agriculture and threatening nutrition in much of the world.
swamidada
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Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:59 pm

Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

Post by swamidada »

UN outlines solution to global food crisis
Ukraine and Russia must be reintegrated into world markets, the UN secretary-general has said

There is no other solution to the global food crisis than the prompt reintegration of both Russia and Ukraine into global food markets, despite the military conflict between the two countries, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, he stressed that “a quick and decisive action” was needed to avoid food shortages, i.e. “lifting export restrictions, allocating surpluses and reserves to vulnerable populations and addressing food price increases to calm market volatility.”

“But let me be frank: There is no effective solution to the food crisis without reintegrating Ukraine’s food production, as well as of the food and fertilizers produced by Russia into world markets despite the war,” Guterres said.

He emphasized that the UN was doing everything it could to promote dialogue on the matter. According to Guterres, two UN teams are working to secure a “package deal” which would ensure the “safe and secure export” of Ukrainian-produced food along with Russian food and fertilizers via the Black Sea to global markets, especially to “developing countries.”

On Tuesday, Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development Rebeca Grynspan visited Moscow, where she had “constructive discussions” on food and fertilizer exports with Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov. She then traveled to Washington to discuss the same issue.

Guterres’ remarks came as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov issued a warning that the world was now “potentially on the verge of a very deep food crisis” which, according to him, was caused by “illegal restrictions” imposed on Russia. Peskov also blamed Ukrainian authorities for deploying mines in Black Sea ports that have made navigation unsafe.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of creating the “threat of famine.”

“Due to the fact that Russia has blocked our ports in the Black Sea and seized our part of the coast of the Sea of Azov, we cannot export 22 million tons of grain that are already in warehouses in our country. This is the volume that was to enter the foreign market,” he said.

The Russian military, however, says two corridors – one in the Black Sea and another in the Azov Sea – are available for civilian traffic.

The global food market, already affected by climate change and the Covid pandemic, was dealt another blow due to the Russian military offensive in Ukraine, as the two countries account for about 30% of global wheat exports. Russia is also the world’s largest exporter of fertilizers.

While the West has accused Russia of causing a surge in food prices by continuing its military operation, Moscow maintains that the real cause of the food crisis is the “politically motivated” Western sanctions against it.

Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insis

https://www.rt.com/russia/556453-un-foo ... on-global/
swamidada
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Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:59 pm

Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

Post by swamidada »

BBC

Fri, June 3, 2022, 9:58 AM
A viral video showing two women scaling the wall of a well to access water has highlighted the acute shortage in several areas of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

The video shows the women on the wall of the well without a rope or harness to access water.

People in Ghusiya village have been forced to take such extreme measures after wells and ponds have dried.

Several other areas across India are facing similar water crisis.

Videos showing Indians risking their lives to get water frequently go viral. In April, a similar video showed a woman going down a well in Maharashtra state to get water.

A 2019 global report had named India among 17 countries where "water stress" was "extremely high".

The report said the states of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Haryana were among those worst hit by the crisis.

In Madhya Pradesh, water shortage is a recurring issue every summer. The state government has promised tap water supply to every village by 2024. But drinking water is still inaccessible to millions.

In Ghusiya, angry villagers have said they will boycott local elections this year to protest against the government.

"We have to go down the well to collect water. There are three wells [here], all have almost dried. No hand pumps have water," one woman told the news agency ANI.

"Government employees and political leaders only come [here] during elections. This time we have decided to not give votes until we have proper water supply," she said.

Many Indians on social media reacted to what they called a "heart-breaking" video and urged officials to urgently help the village.

India is the largest extractor of groundwater in the world - many still rely on it for their daily water supply.

But almost two-thirds of the country's districts are threatened by falling groundwater levels, the World Bank says.

India is projected to face severe water stress by 2050, with 30 cities said to fall in high-risk regions.
swamidada
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Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:59 pm

Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

Post by swamidada »

Associate press

SAMYA KULLAB
Sun, May 29, 2022, 1:06 AM
BAGHDAD (AP) — Salah Chelab crushed a husk of wheat plucked from his sprawling farmland south of Baghdad and inspected its seeds in the palm of one hand. They were several grams lighter than he hoped.

“It’s because of the water shortages,” he said, the farm machine roaring behind him, cutting and gathering his year’s wheat harvest.

Chelab had planted most of his 10 acres (4 hectares) of land, but he was only able to irrigate a quarter of it after the Agriculture Ministry introduced strict water quotas during the growing season, he said. The produce he was growing on the rest of it, he fears, “will die without water.”

At a time when worldwide prices for wheat have soared due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iraqi farmers say they are paying the price for a government decision to cut irrigation for agricultural areas by 50%.

The government took the step in the face of severe water shortages arising from high temperatures and drought — believed to be fueled by climate change — and ongoing water extraction by neighboring countries from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. All those factors have heavily strained wheat production.

Wrestling with the water shortage, Iraq’s government has been unable to tackle other long-neglected issues.

Desertification has been blamed as a factor behind this year’s relentless spate of sandstorms. At least 10 have hit the country in the past few months, covering cities with a thick blanket of orange dust, grounding flights and sending thousands to hospitals.

“We need water to solve the problem of desertification, but we also need water to secure our food supplies,” said Essa Fayadh, a senior official at the Environment Ministry. “We don’t have enough for both.”

Iraq relies on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for nearly all of its water needs. Both flow into Iraq from Turkey and Iran. Those countries have constructed dams that have either blocked or diverted water, creating major shortages in Iraq.

Water Resources Minister Mahdi Rasheed told The Associated Press that river levels were down 60% compared to last year.

For Chelab, less water has meant a smaller grain size and lower crop yields.

In 2021, Chelab produced 30,000 tons of wheat, the year before that 32,000, receipts from Trade Ministry silos show. This year, he expects no more than 10,000.

His crops are both rain-fed and irrigated via a channel from the Euphrates. Due to low precipitation levels, he has had to rely on the river water during the growing season, he said.

Government officials say change is necessary.

The current system has been inefficient and unsustainable for decades. Water scarcity is leaving them no choice but to push to modernize antiquated and wasteful farming techniques.

“We have a strategic plan to face drought considering the lack of rain, global warming, and the lack of irrigation coming from neighboring countries as we did not get our share of water entitlements,” said Hamid al-Naif, spokesman at the Agriculture Ministry.

The ministry took measures to devise new types of drought-resistant wheat and introduce methods to increase crop yields.

“We are still dealing with irrigation systems of the 1950s. It has nothing to do with the farmers,” he said. “The state must make it efficient, we must force the farmer to accept it.”

Iraqi farmers have historically been heavily dependent on the state in the production of food, a reliance that policymakers and experts said drains government funds.

The Agriculture Ministry supports farmers by providing everything from harvesting tools, seeds, fertilizers and pesticides at a subsidized rate or for free. Water diverted from rivers for irrigation is given at no cost. The Trade Ministry then stores or buys produce from farmers and distributes it to markets.

Wheat is a key strategic crop, accounting for 70% of total cereal production in the country.

Planting starts in October and harvest typically begins in April and extends to June in some areas. Last year, the Agriculture Ministry slashed subsidies for fertilizers, seeds and pesticides, a move that has angered farmers.

Local demand for the staple is between 5-6 million tons a year. But local production is shrinking with each passing year. In 2021, Iraq produced 4.2 million tons of wheat, according to the Agriculture Ministry. In 2020, it was 6.2 million tons.

“Today we might get 2.5 million tons at best,” said al-Naif. That would require Iraq to drive up imports.

Most of the wheat harvest is usually sold to the Trade Ministry. In a sign of the low harvest, so far there are currently only 373,000 tons of wheat available in Trade Ministry storehouses, al-Naif said.

To meet demands amid the recent global crisis in the grain market, the government recently changed a policy to allow all Iraqi farmers to sell their produce to the Trade Ministry silos. Previously, this was limited to farmers who operated within the government plan.

“It’s true we need to develop ourselves,” he said. “But the change should be gradual, not immediate.”
swamidada
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Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:59 pm

Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

Post by swamidada »

South Asian countries lose over $14.2 billion a year due to the lack of a water sharing deal

By Athar Parvaiz
Published June 6, 2022
Countries around the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin lose over $14.2 billion annually from a lack of cooperation in sharing the waters of these rivers, with little prospect of accord in the foreseeable future, according to a new analysis.

“A lack of collaborative arrangements and unilateral exploitation of the basin’s freshwater resources have made transboundary water management a contested issue, catalysing disputes and leading to regular conflicts,” says the study led by Ashok Swain, head of the department of peace and conflict research and the director of Research School of International Water Cooperation at Sweden’s Uppsala University.

The report suggests that “considering China’s apathy to any involvement in any basin-wide multilateral cooperation,” the south Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal, could form a common river management framework on the lines of the Mekong River Commission.

Swain, who is also the UNESCO chair on International Water Cooperation, says that countries in the basin will eventually realise that sub-basin cooperation is the only option.

The study, commissioned by the Trans-boundary Rivers of South Asia (TROSA) programme, says that while the demand for water is increasing, its availability and quality are gradually decreasing, fuelling competition among the riparian states (countries bordering a transboundary inland river or lake).

“One promising strategy to promote benefit-sharing is the joint development of multipurpose storage dams in the upper catchment of the GBM basin,” the study says. “That will allow the riparian states to store excess water during the monsoon, regulate floods during the peak time, and increase river flow in the dry period.”

Analysing the economic costs of non-cooperation across the water, energy, food and environment sectors, the researchers identified major adverse effects such as deteriorating water quality and availability, reduced agricultural productivity and fisheries, degradation of ecosystems, untapped hydropower potential and greater loss of lives and livelihoods due to natural disasters.

Between 1976 and 1993, the lack of adequate cooperative arrangements in the Ganges basin between Bangladesh and India cost Bangladesh annual financial losses of about US$186.59 million, which was around 0.6% of the country’s GDP at that time.

Similarly, due to non-cooperation, Nepal and Bhutan lose annual economic benefits of between $105 million and $1.8 billion under different scenarios from the development of hydropower generation projects.

“Such a high cost of non-cooperation in one of the most climate-stressed regions warrants for more urgent action by various stakeholders to improve and sustain cooperation on shared waters and associated natural resources,” the study says.

“In the GBM basin, any political party of any country that proposes that more water should be allocated to the neighbouring country will be booted out of power promptly,” Asit Biswas, director of the Singapore-based consultancy firm Water Management International and a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, UK, said.

Biswas notes that even for two countries like India and Bangladesh, which enjoy good relations, there have been disagreements on water-sharing from the time Bangladesh was created in 1971.

As for countries like India and China that are not only serious geopolitical rivals but have had long-standing border disputes, it is naive to consider that they will cooperate in any way on water for the next 30-50 years, says Biswas.

He believes Bangladesh, India and Nepal can improve their own water management practices to gain billions of dollars, regardless of what happens in its upstream countries.

“My advice to all the countries of the GBM basin is to first improve their national water management practices, which can be done now and under the exclusive control of each national government, rather than wait for real cooperation in the GBM basin, which is highly unlikely to occur for at least the next 30 to 40 years,” he says.

Scott Moore, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who specialises in environmental sustainability, technology, and international relations, tells SciDev.Net that there were several factors that make cooperation difficult in the GBM basin. “These include geopolitical tensions, sectarian and identitarian divides, underdeveloped institutional capacity, and a lack of shared infrastructure.”

Moore says that the estimate quoted by the study of $14 billion “does not sound completely unreasonable, though it should be treated as entirely indicative.”

For the sake of the region’s future progress it is important “to change the status quo and begin a new era of meaningful multilateral cooperation for the best possible use of their shared water resources,” Swain says, adding that even “maintaining the status quo will make the existing vulnerabilities more complex”.

https://qz.com/india/2173421/south-asia ... source=YPL
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

‘We Buried Him and Kept Walking’: Children Die as Somalis Flee Hunger

Post by kmaherali »

The worst drought in four decades and a sharp rise in food prices caused by the war in Ukraine have left almost half of Somalia’s people facing acute food shortages.

Abdi Latif DahirMalin Fezehai
By Abdi Latif DahirPhotographs by Malin Fezehai
Published June 11, 2022
Updated June 12, 2022, 1:30 p.m. ET

DOOLOW, Somalia — When her crops failed and her parched goats died, Hirsiyo Mohamed left her home in southwestern Somalia, carrying and coaxing three of her eight children on the long walk across a bare and dusty landscape in temperatures as high as 100 degrees.

Along the way, her 3½-year-old son, Adan, tugged at her robe, begging for food and water. But there was none to give, she said. “We buried him and kept walking.”

They reached an aid camp in the town of Doolow after four days, but her malnourished 8-year-old daughter, Habiba, soon contracted whooping cough and died, she said. Sitting in her makeshift tent last month, holding her 2½-year-old daughter, Maryam, in her lap, she said, “This drought has finished us.”

The worst drought in four decades is imperiling lives across the Horn of Africa, with up to 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia facing the risk of starvation by the end of this year, according to the World Food Program.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is exacerbating the situation, cutting off most of the wheat imports that Somalia depends on and sharply increasing the prices of fuel, food and fertilizer.

The threat of hunger across Africa is so dire that last week the head of the African Union, President Macky Sall of Senegal, appealed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to lift the blockade on exports of Ukrainian grain and fertilizer — even as American diplomats warned of Russian efforts to sell stolen Ukrainian wheat to African nations.

The most devastating crisis is unfolding in Somalia, where about seven million of the country’s estimated 16 million people face acute food shortages. Since January, at least 448 children have died from severe acute malnutrition, according to a database managed by UNICEF.

Aid donors, focused on the crisis in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic, have pledged only about 18 percent of the $1.46 billion needed for Somalia, according to the United Nations’ financial tracking service. “This will put the world in a moral and ethical dilemma,” said El-Khidir Daloum, the Somalia country director for the World Food Program, a U.N. agency.

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Hirsiyo Mohamed set out with three of her eight children to find food and water. Two of them died, and her 2½-year-old daughter, Maryam, remains with her at an aid camp in Doolow, in southern Somalia.

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Fatuma Yusuf, a severely malnourished child, was being taken care of last month at the stabilization center at the Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu.

With the rivers low, wells dry and their livestock dead, families are walking or getting on buses and donkeys — sometimes for hundreds of miles — just to find food, water or emergency medical care.

Parents flow into the capital, Mogadishu, bringing their malnourished children to health facilities like Benadir Hospital, one of few in the country with a pediatric stabilization unit. The beds on a recent visit were packed with bony babies with scaly skin and hair that had lost its natural color because of malnutrition. Many of the children were also sick with illnesses like measles and were being fed through nasal tubes and needed oxygen to breathe.


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By The New York Times

Mothers sat in the corridors, slowly feeding their children the peanut-based paste used to fight malnutrition. The price of this lifesaving product is projected to increase by up to 16 percent because of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, which made ingredients, packaging and supply chains more costly, according to UNICEF.

At the hospital’s cholera treatment unit, Adan Diyad held the hand of his 4-year-old son, Zakariya, as the boy’s protruding ribs heaved. Mr. Diyad had abandoned his maize and bean fields in the southwestern region of Bay after the river ran low.

In Mogadishu, he settled at a crowded camp for displaced people with his wife and three children, where they had no toilet and not enough clean water. Without a job, he could not feed his family. Zakariya, usually chirpy, grew emaciated. The night before Mr. Diyad carried him into the hospital, he said he kept listening to his son’s heartbeat to make sure that he had not died.

“He couldn’t even open his eyes when I brought him here,” Mr. Diyad said.

Mr. Diyad and his family are among the 560,000 people displaced by the drought this year. As many as three million Somalis have also been displaced by tribal and political conflicts and the ever-growing threat from the terrorist group Al Shabab.

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Camps for displaced people in Somalia are growing. A new section of the Qansahley camp in Doolow, in the southern Gedo region.

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Children in the Qansahley camp in Doolow.

In rural areas across south and central Somalia, danger and poor road networks have made it hard for the authorities or aid agencies to reach those in need. The United Nations estimates that almost 900,000 Somalis live in inaccessible areas controlled by the Shabab — though aid workers believe those figures are higher.

Mohammed Ali Hussein, the deputy governor of the southern Gedo region, acknowledged that the local authorities were often unable to venture out of areas they control to rescue those in need, even when they received a distress call.

Extreme weather events, some linked to climate change, have devastated communities, too, bringing flash floods, cyclones, rising temperatures, a locust infestation that destroyed crops and, now, four consecutive failed rainy seasons.

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Maryam Feisal, a severely malnourished child who also contracted measles, with her mother, Mulki Abdulkadir, last month at the pediatric stabilization center at the Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu.

“These crises just keep coming one after another,” so people have not had a chance to rebuild their farms or herds, said Daniel Molla, the chief technical adviser on food and nutrition for Somalia at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Those uprooted by the drought are arriving in towns and cities where many are already straining to afford food.

Somalia imports over half of its food, and the poor in Somalia already spend 60 to 80 percent of their income on food. The loss of wheat from Ukraine, supply-chain delays and soaring inflation have led to sharp rises in the prices of cooking oil and staples like rice and sorghum.

At a market in the border town of Doolow, more than two dozen tables were abandoned because vendors could no longer afford to stock produce from local farms. The remaining retailers sold paltry supplies of cherry tomatoes, dried lemons and unripe bananas to the few customers trickling in.

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Muslima Hassan, a dangerously malnourished child, on her grandmother’s hip at a health facility in Doolow town. The family left the town of Wajid, in the southwestern region of Bakool, because of drought and insecurity.

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A child in Doolow, Somalia, being measured for malnutrition using a mid-upper arm circumference tape. The red zone means severe acute malnutrition.

Some of the shoppers were displaced people with food vouchers from aid groups, worried about the rising food prices.

Traders like Adan Mohamed, who manages a juice and snacks shop, say they had to raise their prices after the costs of sugar, flour and fruits soared. “Everything is expensive,” said Mr. Mohamed, blending pineapples imported from Kenya. And with wages relatively unchanged, many Somalis said they have cut back on meat and camel milk. Over three million herd animals have perished since mid-2021, according to monitoring agencies.

The drought is also straining the social support systems that Somalis depend on during crises.

As thousands of hungry and homeless people flooded the capital, the women at the Hiil-Haween Cooperative sought ways to support them. But faced with their own soaring bills, many of the women said they had little to share. They collected clothes and food for about 70 displaced people.

“We had to reach deep into our community to find anything,” said Hadiya Hassan, who leads the cooperative.

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With no water or pasture, rural communities have been hit the hardest in the drought that has continued to blanket Somalia. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that rural families have lost up to 30 percent of their animals to the drought.

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Building makeshift shelters at the Kaharey Internally Displacement Settlement in Doolow. People are fleeing not just drought, but also instability caused by the extremist group Al Shabab.

Experts forecast that the upcoming October to December rainy season will most likely fail, pushing the drought into 2023. The predictions are worrying analysts, who say the deteriorating conditions and the delayed scale-up in funding could mirror the severe 2011 drought that killed about 260,000 Somalis.

“There are scary echoes of 2011,” said Daniel Maxwell, a professor of food security at Tufts University who co-wrote the book “Famine in Somalia.”

For now, the merciless drought is forcing some families to make hard choices.

Back at the Benadir hospital in Mogadishu, Amina Abdullahi gazed at her severely malnourished 3-month-old daughter, Fatuma Yusuf. Clenching her fists and gasping for air, the baby let out a feeble cry, drawing smiles from the doctors who were happy to hear her make any noise at all.

“She was as still as the dead when we brought her here,” Ms. Abdullahi said. But even though the baby had gained more than a pound in the hospital, she was still less than five pounds in all — not even half what she should be. Doctors said it would be a while before she was discharged.

This pained Ms. Abdullahi. She had left six other children behind in Beledweyne, about 200 miles away, on a small, desiccated farm with her goats dying.

“The suffering back home is indescribable,” she said. “I want to go back to my children.”

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A dead goat in May on the outskirts of Doolow town. An estimated three million goats, cows and camels have died in the past year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Mo Dewji plans Sh9.2 trillion grains production investment via SPAC

Post by kmaherali »

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The new company will produce grains and edible oils in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and the Central African Republic

Summary

He said he aimed to structure the venture, for which he has yet to secure land, as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and would himself put up $400 million as 10% to 20% of total funding.

Businessman Mohammed Dewji, has said he plans to float an agriculture company worth up to Sh9.2 trillion ($4 billion) in either New York or London next year, with money raised mainly from development banks, Reuters reports.

Russia's military operations Ukraine in February sent global grain and fertiliser prices to the roof, though they have retreated in recent weeks. And as result Inflation has subsequently risen in many African countries and beyond.

Dewji, 47, whose family conglomerate MeTL Group employs thousands, said the new company will produce grains and edible oils in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and the Central African Republic.

"This is a fantastic way to bring food security... with the potential to feed ourselves and feed the world," he told Reuters in an interview in London on Thursday.

He said he aimed to structure the venture, for which he has yet to secure land, as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and would himself put up $400 million as 10% to 20% of total funding.

A roadshow to raise the remaining funds is planned in the first quarter of 2023, Dewji said, adding that he was open to other forms of fundraising.

SPACs are shell corporations that list on stock exchanges to merge with an existing company to take it public without going through a conventional IPO process. This year, appetite has waned for the vehicles.

Dewji predicted the new company, which might diversify into soy bean and sugar plantations, could net investors a five- to 10-time return over a decade, but would require "patient, impact, long-term capital."

MeTL, which is unlisted and operates in a range of sectors also including textiles, logistics and insurance, plans to invest $250 million in the next two to three years, Dewji said, about 40 of the money will come from bank loans.

That would include adding four factories around Tanzania to an existing soft drinks factory to compete with Coca-Cola and Pepsi and raising production of sisal, from 12,000 to 15,000 tons this year.

He said MeTL's current annual revenues topped $2 billion and would rise this year due to high commodity prices. He, however did not give profit figures.

https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ac-3874552
kmaherali
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The Coming Crisis Along the Colorado River

Post by kmaherali »

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By Daniel Rothberg

Mr. Rothberg is a reporter for The Nevada Independent, where he covers the environment, water and energy. He is writing a book about water scarcity in Nevada.

It’s past time to get real about the Southwest’s hardest-working river.

About 40 million people rely on the Colorado River as it flows from Colorado to Mexico. But overuse and climate change have contributed to its reservoirs drying up at such a rapid rate that the probability of disastrous disruptions to the deliveries of water and hydroelectric power across the Southwest have become increasingly likely. Now the seven states that depend on the river must negotiate major cuts in water use by mid-August or have them imposed by the federal government.

Those cuts are merely the beginning as the region struggles to adapt to an increasingly arid West. The rules for operating the river’s shrinking reservoirs expire in 2026, and those seven states must forge a new agreement on water use for farmers, businesses and cities.

What’s worse, all of this is happening in a region that is one of the fastest growing in the United States, even as the signs of an impending crisis become more pronounced. Outside of Las Vegas, Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir by volume, fed by the Colorado and three smaller tributaries, is nearly three-quarters empty and at its lowest level since April 1937, when it was first being filled. The 22-year downward trend is “a stark illustration of climate change and a long-term drought that may be the worst in the U.S. West in 12 centuries,” according to NASA’s Earth Observatory program.

A century of agreements, contracts and contingencies known as the Law of the River are meant to settle who gets water in times of scarcity. But this framework overestimates the availability of water; the legal rights to water held by the river’s users exceed the amount that typically flows into it. The law is also untested in key areas — for instance, the exact terms by which states along the upper reaches of the river must send water downriver for the states there to get their full allocation. All of this has created a great deal of uncertainty, and it’s hard to say how the federal government will go about reducing water allotments, if it comes to that.

As a result, the Colorado River is hurtling toward a social, political and environmental crisis at a pace that surpasses the Law of the River’s ability to prevent it. In a world of less water, everyone who uses the river must adjust.

Inevitably, every water user, from large irrigation districts to sprawling cities, has an argument for why it should not be cut. Arizona and California, which draw most of the water from Lake Mead, along with Nevada, make up the Lower Colorado River Basin. Their interpretation of the rules differs from how the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming see it. Together, those Upper Basin states use less water than their allotments allow but are eyeing more. The onus of any cuts, they argue, should fall on the downstream states. But federal officials have made clear they expect all states and users to compensate for the shortage.

Significant cuts in water allocations will require sharp reductions in water use through conservation and other efficiencies and a significant investment in infrastructure. This will look far different from the canals and dams of the 20th century. This new approach will involve strategies to reduce water use, by converting lawns to desert landscape, for instance, improving water delivery systems and reconsidering which crops to grow in an arid environment. So-called augmentation projects, such as desalination plants and indoor recycling projects, are being studied. But they are years away.

Agriculture uses about 70 to 80 percent of the water. As the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s John Entsminger recently said, “you can evacuate Denver, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles and still not have counted up enough water” to meet the needed reductions. But asking farmers to idle fields, apply more efficient irrigation practices or switch crops often comes with cascading consequences that are not just economic. They are social and political, costs absorbed by whole communities. For the Imperial Irrigation District in Southern California, the river’s largest user, for instance, using less water means less runoff flowing to the hyper-salty Salton Sea, where exposed shorelines are a source of windblown toxic dust.

It is easy to point a finger at agriculture’s outsize cumulative use, but growing food requires a lot of water. Entire communities have formed around the promise of water. Future plans must include comprehensive investments to ease consequences of asking irrigators to use less.

Reliant on the Colorado River with ambitions to grow, cities in the basin must share in the pain. It is inequitable to expect the agricultural sector to take painful cuts even as some states envision unrealistic futures in which additional water can be diverted for growing populations. Cities must adapt, and there are proven models for doing this.

But matching the current supply with demand won’t be enough to correct the flaws in the rules that govern the river’s water. In addition to overestimating supply, the Law of the River is riddled with injustices and has historically ignored the interests of Indigenous communities and the environment.

During a recent conference in Boulder, Colo., the National Audubon Society’s Jennifer Pitt said that the river’s framework “may be no longer functioning today for those who have water rights, but for those stakeholders and interests who never were included, starting with the compact, it has never worked.” Thirty Native American tribes in the Colorado River Basin hold priority rights to more than one-fifth of the river, yet many of their communities lack access to that water. And because the agreements governing the river prioritize the maximum use of water (and then some), so much water is removed that the river rarely reaches the once-biodiverse delta where it should empty into the Gulf of California in Mexico.

Ms. Pitt, the head of Audubon’s Colorado River Project, and other experts at the conference said it is imperative to plan for not just a river where supply meets demand but to go one step further — to conserve even more water and move away from living on the “razor’s edge,” where crisis management trumps any other value.

It took a web of policies to build the system we have today, and it will take a web of guidelines, investments and coordination to reframe our relationship with the river. If “developing” the West was once an imposition of brute will, bolstered by unrealistic water forecasts, today’s work is just the opposite: a reality check about our climate and our need to make do with less water.

Daniel Rothberg is a reporter for The Nevada Independent, where he covers the environment, water and energy. He is writing a book about water scarcity in Nevada.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
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‘Very Dire’: Devastated by Floods, Pakistan Faces Looming Food Crisis

Post by kmaherali »

The flooding has crippled Pakistan’s agricultural sector, battering the country as it reels from an economic crisis and double-digit inflation that has sent the price of basics soaring.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Violent swells have swept away roads, homes, schools and hospitals across much of Pakistan. Millions of people have been driven from their homes, struggling through waist-deep, fetid water to reach islands of safety. Nearly all of the country’s crops along with thousands of livestock and stores of wheat and fertilizer have been damaged — prompting warnings of a looming food crisis.

Since a deluge of monsoon rains lashed Pakistan last week, piling more water on top of more than two months of record flooding that has killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of millions, the Pakistani government and international relief organizations have scrambled to save people and vital infrastructure in what officials have called a climate disaster of epic proportions.

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Source: UNOSAT analysis of Suomi NPP satellite data, July 1 to Aug. 31By Agnes Chang

Floodwater now covers around a third of the country, including its agricultural belt, with more rain predicted in the coming weeks. The damage from the flood will likely be “far greater” than initial estimates of around $10 billion, according to the country’s planning minister, Ahsan Iqbal.

The flooding has crippled a country that was already reeling from an economic crisis and double digit-inflation that has sent the price of basic goods soaring. Now the flooding threatens to set Pakistan back years or even decades, officials warned, and to fan the flames of political tensions that have engulfed the country since former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted last spring.

The damage to the country’s agricultural sector could also be felt across the globe, experts warn. Pakistan is one of the world’s top producers and exporters of cotton and rice — crops that have been devastated by the flood. As much as half of the country’s cotton crop has been destroyed, officials said, a blow to global cotton production in a year when cotton prices have soared as other major producers from the United States to China have been hit with extreme weather.

The floodwaters also threaten to derail Pakistan’s wheat planting season this fall, raising the possibility of continued food shortfalls and price spikes through next year. It is an alarming prospect in a country that depends on its wheat production to feed itself at a time when global wheat supplies are precarious.

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People affected by massive flooding after heavy monsoon rains were rescued from their damaged houses in Sindh province.Credit...Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“We’re in a very dire situation,” said Rathi Palakrishnan, deputy country director of the World Food Program in Pakistan. “There’s no buffer stocks of wheat, there’s no seeds because farmers have lost them.”

“If the flood levels don’t recede before the planting season in October, we’re in big trouble,” she added.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government, along with the United Nations, has appealed for $160 million in emergency funding to reach 5.2 million of the country’s most vulnerable people.

The scale of the devastation in Pakistan stands out even in a year punctuated by extreme weather, including heat waves across Europe and the United States, intense rain that has drenched parts of Asia and the worst drought to hit East Africa in decades.

Since the start of the monsoon season in Pakistan this summer, more than 1,300 people have died in floods — nearly half of whom are children — and more than 6,000 have been injured, according to the United Nations. Around 33 million people have been displaced. Floodwater now covers around 100,000 square miles — an area larger than the size of Britain — with more floods expected in the coming weeks.

Sindh Province, which produces around a third of the country’s food supply, has been among the hardest hit by the rains. The province received nearly six times its 30-year average rainfall this monsoon season, which has damaged around 50 percent of the province’s crops, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

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Sources: 2017-21 crop areas from Impact Observatory analysis of Sentinel-2 imagery; flood extent from UNOSATBy Agnes Chang

In Sanghar, one of the largest cotton-producing districts in Sindh, Imdad Hingorja, a 45-year-old farmer, owns a small plot of land and was growing cotton. He said that the rains and floods came exactly when the crops in his fields were ready to harvest.

“I have lost everything now. There is five to six feet of water in my fields, and I do not know how long it will take the water to dry,” said Mr. Hingorja, whose sole source of income to feed his five-member family is farming.

Mr. Hingorja recently took a loan from a relative to buy new seeds and fertilizer after his stores washed away in the floods. But if the waist-deep water does not subside by the time he needs to plant, he does not know what he will do.

“Floods are God’s wrath, and we cannot escape from it. But who will tell it to the lender who will now ask me to pay back his money?” he said. “I will have not only lost my standing crops but also wasted my entire agriculture year.”

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Flooded residential areas after heavy monsoon rains in Dera Allah Yar, Balochistan province.Credit...Fida Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Tank District in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, a vast province in the northwest, the flooding washed out 35 acres of land that Rahimullah Khan, 47, cultivates, destroying his entire crop of rice, corn and sugar cane. He had poured his yearly savings into the crops, he said, and borrowed around 135,000 Pakistani rupees — or nearly $1,700 dollars — for fertilizer.

“I am left with nothing but a pair of cows,” Mr. Khan said. “The dairy from the cow is the only thing keeping my children from complete hunger.”

But if the water recedes, he added, he will have to sell the cows to pay back his loans and gather the resources he needs to plant his fall wheat crop.

Even before the monsoon rains hit this year, many of the country’s farmers had barely scraped by, as the economic crisis pushed the price of the basics needed to cultivate beyond their reach and season after season of extreme weather — from heat waves to heavy monsoon rains — lashed their fields.

“Farmers have been pushed into poverty as most of them are in debt due to high-interest rates on loans to buy farm inputs such as seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers,” said Akram Khaskheli, a leader of Hari Welfare Association, a nongovernmental organization for farmers based in Hyderabad.

Now, the destruction of their crops has resulted in millions of rupees of loss to farmers and pushed up the prices of vegetables like onions and tomatoes, crops of which were already destroyed.

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Victims of heavy flooding from monsoon rains gather to receive relief aid from the Pakistani Army in the Qambar Shahdadkot district of Sindh Province.Credit...Fareed Khan/Associated Press

While large landowners will likely survive the floods, the damage has been devastating for the tens of thousands of smaller landowners and farmers that make up the backbone of Pakistan’s agriculture sector, Mr. Khaskheli added.

Land ownership remains an extremely feudal system in Pakistan, made up largely of vast estates cultivated by farmers who work as forced labor, primarily in the form of debt bondage.

Officials have warned that the damage and economic losses will be felt throughout the country for months and years to come. The loss of cotton to Pakistan’s textile industry, which contributes nearly 10 percent of the country’s G.D.P., could hamper any hopes for an economic recovery.

Aid officials have warned that even after the floods subside, rural communities face a possible second wave of deaths from food shortages and diseases transmitted by contaminated water and animals. And severe inflation and shortages of fresh produce will likely hit urban centers unaffected by the flooding.

To address the immediate needs of the millions affected by the flooding, aid groups and the Pakistani government have launched rescue efforts and mounted emergency aid distribution.

“The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids — the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a message launching an appeal for international assistance to Pakistan.

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Temporary housing under construction d for flood victims in Larkana District in Sindh, Pakistan.Credit...Fareed Khan/Associated Press

But the scale of the crisis has complicated relief efforts, Pakistani officials say. And as conditions worsens, anger has risen across Pakistan over the government’s response.

“We were left to fend for ourselves,” said Mushtaq Jamali, 84, a farmer from Sindh Province. “There was not a single government official or elected representative in our village to help us to evacuate.”

Mr. Jamali, 84, migrated from the outskirts of Jacobabad, a city in Sindh, to the port city of Karachi late last month after flooding consumed his small farm.

The floods this year were the latest extreme weather calamity to uproot his family. The 2010 floods that hit Sindh also forced Mr. Jamali, along with his 18-member extended family, to migrate to Karachi, after their house was damaged. For five years, he saved money to reconstruct their home, he said.

But in recent years, life in the district has become almost impossible to survive. Jacobabad is one of Pakistan’s most climate-change-hit districts and is considered one of the hottest places on earth.

In May, the temperatures rose to 124 degrees Fahrenheit — 51 degrees Celsius — making it one of the hottest cities in the world. Then the flooding in August destroyed his home yet again. Now, he says, he and his family plan to stay in Karachi permanently.

“Because of excessive rains, floods, and heat, it is difficult to survive in Jacobabad now and construct the house again,” he said. “Our area was completely inundated. Everything was under water. There was not enough dry land even to bury the people who died because of collapses of roofs and walls of their houses.”

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Cotton crops damaged by flood waters in the village of Sammu Khan Bhanbro in Sukkur, Sindh province.Credit...Asif Hassan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Christina Goldbaum reported from Dubai and Islamabad, Pakistan, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi. Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from Islamabad.

Christina Goldbaum is a correspondent in the Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau. @cegoldbaum

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
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Save the SOIL, save the WORLD

Post by kmaherali »

Did you know? ... We’re losing quality soil!

Here’s what that means…

- Skyrocketing food prices
- Food that doesn’t taste as good
- An increase in diseases as our soil is stripped of vital nutrients
- And eventually, if we continue on this path, NO FOOD

But there is hope, and that’s exactly what the inspiring film The Need to GROW is about!

Learn how you can make a REAL impact.

--->>This week, for a limited time, you can watch The Need to GROW for FREE! https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?uid=10 ... Grow23july
This moving documentary has won over a dozen awards at film festivals, including "Best Documentary," "Audience Favorite" and "Best Environmental Film."

It will touch your heart, give you hope and inspire you to be part of the solution on planet earth.

--->>Click here to watch The Need to GROW today! https://grow.foodrevolution.org/?uid=10 ... Grow23july

We promise you’ll be glad you watched it!
Because health means everything,
kmaherali
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Heat, War and Trade Protections Raise Uncertainty for Food Prices

Post by kmaherali »

Experts are warning of a new normal in which food supplies — and prices — could be rocked more regularly.

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A wildfire burned on the Greek island of Rhodes last month. Extreme weather events are the main disrupter of food prices this year.Credit...Petros Giannakouris/Associated Press

As the rate of food price inflation eases in the United States and Europe, analysts are warning of a new era of volatility in global food prices, ushered in by a series of threats coming together in unprecedented ways.

A combination of calamities — extreme weather, Russia’s targeting of grain supplies in Ukraine and some countries’ growing willingness to erect protectionist barriers to food trade — has left food supplies more vulnerable and less prepared to absorb any one disruption, analysts say.

“This is the new normal now, with more volatility and unpredictability, whether that’s in commodity prices or food prices,” said Dennis Voznesenski, a commodities analyst at Rabobank in Sydney, Australia.

Even without major disruptions, food prices can be variable, and many factors play into the price of a bushel of wheat or loaf of bread.

Last month, Russia pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal that had permitted Ukrainian farm exports by sea. The United Nations’ food price index rose in July, interrupting its monthslong downward trend because of a jump in vegetable oil prices, driven in part by worries over shortages of Ukrainian sunflower seeds.

Droughts in India, Indonesia and other Asian food exporters have led to smaller harvests. Faced with consumers outraged over higher prices, governments have banned the export of critical foods, causing further disruptions. Since late June, the price of an Asian benchmark for rice has jumped 25 percent, according to the Thai Rice Exporters Association.

Other factors are pressuring prices on supermarket shelves, including higher labor costs as workers try to keep pace with inflation. And food producers are finding that in an environment of rising prices, they can lift them even higher to pad their profits.

Compared with early 2020, consumer food prices are up about 30 percent in Europe and 23 percent in the United States.

The disruptions have had a disproportionately negative impact on small farmers and people living in low-income countries, while leaving the world vulnerable to future upheaval. Last year, more than 700 million people faced hunger and 2.4 billion people lacked year-round access to sufficient and nutritious food, according to the United Nations.

“The accumulation of the last shocks in the last few years have put countries in a very, very bad situation,” said Maximo Torero, the chief economist of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. “If another shock comes today, I honestly don’t know how they’re going to handle it.”

Extreme weather

This year, severe weather has been the main disrupter of food prices, said Hiral Patel, the head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays in London.

Heat waves have broken records in China, wildfires have raged across southern Europe and North Africa, and July was the world’s hottest month on record.

In Pakistan, where catastrophic floods in 2022 washed away much of the country’s crops, the annual rate of food price inflation reached nearly 49 percent in May, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program.

Forecasters warn that the earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by greenhouses gas emissions and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.

“There are increased chances of simultaneous crop losses in different parts of the world,” Ms. Patel said.

The forecast for Europe’s crop yields, including soft wheat and spring barley, was revised lower recently by the European Commission because of “distinctly drier-than-usual conditions” in large parts of the continent.

Curtailed food production in one region for one year usually does not matter much in a flexible and dynamic market, said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. The issue arises when crops are knocked out for a few years running in multiple markets — for example, from droughts.

“Those could create a lot more volatility going forward — it’s one of the uncertainties about climate change,” Mr. Glauber said. Persistent droughts “could lead to regional shortfalls and, with poor countries unable to afford higher prices, food security issues.”

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A large yellow farm vehicle moves through a field, gathering wheat, under a blue sky.
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A wheat field in Ukraine. Last month, Russia pulled out of a deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grains through the Black Sea. As a result, grain prices could rise by 10 to 15 percent. Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

War in Ukraine

Last month, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia let the Black Sea grain deal expire and then his military attacked grain storage in Ukraine, the price of wheat rose, which in turn lifted prices of corn and soybeans. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, recently estimated that the end of the deal could lead grain prices to increase by 10 to 15 percent.

While that’s a significant jump, it’s smaller than the sudden surge in prices in the first weeks of the war.

That’s because Ukrainian farmers are growing significantly less today. Ukraine also has increased its ability to export grain via rail and river, but these alternative routes cost more, said Mr. Voznesenski at Rabobank. And these routes aren’t immune from attacks or severe weather, including drought.

“You can’t tell what Putin is going to do tomorrow,” Mr. Voznesenski said. “You can’t tell when a government is going to put an export restriction in.” An increase in food supply intervention by governments “is going to create a lot more unpredictability,” he added.

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A farmer in a field of waist-high plants bends over to gather a harvest.
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Rice fields in Guwahati, India. The Indian government recently imposed a ban on some rice exports. Credit...Anupam Nath/Associated Press

Trade protectionism

Volatility in food prices has encouraged some governments to turn to restricting trade in order to keep precious stores of food closer to home.

Last month, India, the world’s largest rice supplier, issued an export ban on non-basmati white rice. India had imposed a 20 percent export duty on that rice last year, but exports continued to rise because of geopolitical issues and extreme climate conditions in other countries, the Indian government said. On Friday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that rice prices in July were up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier, pushing its rice price index to the highest in 12 years.

India is not alone in taking such measures. Overall, the number of curbs or tax increases on food exports has jumped 62 percent since last year, according to the Global Trade Alert, a nonprofit based in Switzerland. Globally, 176 export curbs are in effect on food, feed or fertilizer.

Economists and trade experts have cautioned against these types of policies. Though they may shield local consumers from food inflation in the near term, they ultimately compound the types of global food shortages that governments are trying to mitigate.

In a recent food security summit hosted by the United Nations in Rome, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, urged countries to reject protectionism and turn to more open trade as a way to address food shortages.

For many countries, the problem has been worsened by the weak value of their currencies in comparison with the U.S. dollar, which leaves them unable to buy as many dollar-denominated commodities as before.

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The Rhine River seen from above, with narrow ships moving past river beds on either side.
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Persistent drought has lowered water levels on critical shipping routes, including the Rhine River in Germany.Credit...Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

Invisible costs

As food producers are dealing with more supply risks, related expenses are also rising. Much of the cost of food we eat at home comes from transportation and other expenses faced by food companies — not just from the commodity cost of growing the wheat or sugar. And some of those nonagricultural costs are rising, too.

Companies are being forced to fork out money for insurance policies to deal with harsh weather and invest in new suppliers to make their business more resilient.

Persistent drought has lowered water levels on key shipping routes, including the Panama Canal and the Rhine River in Europe, requiring shippers to lighten their loads or find other routes.

And then there is the cost of sustainability efforts as countries seek to meet net-zero-emissions targets. In all, risks that food prices stay high or swing more wildly have grown.

“There’s a range of new external shocks,” Ms. Patel of Barclays said. “The range of factors make it even more challenging to predict how volatile it will be going forward.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/busi ... ility.html
kmaherali
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How a Fertilizer Shortage Is Spreading Desperate Hunger

Post by kmaherali »

Across Africa and in parts of Asia, disruption to the supply chain for fertilizer is raising food prices and increasing malnutrition.

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A warehouse at a fertilizer blending plant in Gombe, Nigeria. The factory had been idled, and nearly all its 100-plus workers laid off.

Suleiman Chubado is not entirely clear what caused the price of fertilizer to more than double over the past year, but he is bitterly aware of the consequences. At his farm in northeastern Nigeria, he can no longer afford enough fertilizer, so his corn is stunted and pale, the scraggly plants bending toward the powdery earth.

Inside his mud house, he has grown accustomed to explaining to his two young children and pregnant wife why they must make do with two meals a day — and sometimes only one — even as hunger gnaws.

As he and his neighbors commiserate over the calamity unfolding across much of Africa, they exchange theories on one source of trouble: Russia’s war on Ukraine, which disrupted shipments of key ingredients for fertilizer.

“We are in two different worlds, separated by airplanes and oceans,” Mr. Chubado said. “How can it be affecting us here?”

That question is reverberating in many lower-income countries. Farmers are grappling with shocks that made fertilizer scarce and unaffordable, diminishing harvests, raising food prices and spreading hunger.

The war in Ukraine reduced the region’s grain exports and sent the price of staples like wheat soaring from Egypt to Indonesia. The world’s food supply is also menaced by the ravages of climate change — heat waves, drought, floods.

Now, scarce and expensive fertilizer is combining with these other forces to threaten livelihoods.

The breakdown in fertilizer production challenges the orthodoxy that has dominated international trade for decades. Prominent economists have promoted globalization as insurance against upheaval. When factories in one place cannot produce goods, they can be summoned from somewhere else. Yet as farmers across Africa and parts of Asia contend with fertilizer shortages, their anguish attests to a less celebrated aspect of the interlinked economy: Shared dependence on vital products from dominant suppliers yields widespread danger when shocks emerge.

ImageSuleiman Chubado, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a yellow plastic jug, stands in an overgrown patch of land under a cloud-filled sky.
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“How can it be affecting us here?” Suleiman Chubado asked about the war in Ukraine, 3,000 miles away from his farm outside Yola, Nigeria.

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A crowded path between stalls selling produce in an outdoor market.
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The central market in Yola, where Mr. Chubado could afford to buy only a portion of a sack of fertilizer.

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A laborer carrying a large sack of cassava on his head walks through the Yola market.
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Rising prices for food in the Yola market have also put a squeeze on households.

The crisis started with the Covid-19 pandemic, which increased the cost of transporting fertilizer ingredients. Then came the war. Finally, over the last 18 months, the U.S. Federal Reserve aggressively lifted interest rates to choke off domestic inflation. That has lifted the value of the American dollar against many currencies. Because fertilizer components are priced in dollars, they have become vastly more expensive in countries like Nigeria.

Since February 2022, the price of fertilizer has more than doubled in Nigeria and 13 other countries, according to a survey by ActionAid, an international relief group. Concern about food insecurity has been “alarmingly high” in much of West and Central Africa, according to a World Bank bulletin.

In Nigeria alone, Africa’s most populous country, nearly 90 million people — roughly two-fifths of the nation — suffer from “insufficient food consumption,” according to data from the World Food Program.

In conversations with three dozen people engaged in growing crops, trading food and distributing fertilizer in northeastern Nigeria, a sense of bewilderment is palpable alongside desperation.

Farmers are shifting from growing staples like rice and corn to less valuable crops like soybeans and peanuts, which require less fertilizer. Thieves are stealing harvests. Wives are leaving husbands and returning to families with greater access to food. Parents are pulling children out of school for a lack of tuition money. Upward mobility has yielded to the imperative to hang on.

Mr. Chubado, 27, is eager to send his children to university. He typically uses some of his crop to feed his family while selling the rest to raise cash. Yet with no extra crop to sell this year, he recently moved his 10-year-old son, Abubakar, from a private school where classes are no larger than 20 to a government school where 70 children crowd into classrooms.

He cannot afford to buy the usual three school uniforms, so Abubakar must make do with one. Some days, his son complains that his uniform is too dirty and refuses to go to school.

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Three adults heave grain into a large pile with plastic buckets.
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Sorting grain at a market in Gombe.

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2023/10/11/112 ... g_720p.mp4

Buyers and vendors of rice negotiating prices.CreditCredit...

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Three workers immerse their hands into three large outdoor drums filled with grain foaming on top.
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Laborers in Gombe soaking and heating rice to separate the grain from husks.

The Pandemic Shock

Faced with extraordinary prices for inorganic or commercial fertilizers, some farmers are shifting to organic varieties, including animal manure. Longer term, that is better for soil, food quality and public health, experts say.

But it can take years for crops grown with organic fertilizers to approach the yields achieved through the use of commercial varieties. In Nigeria, home to more than 220 million people, the highest priority is the immediate pursuit of additional food. At least for now, inorganic fertilizers remain a crucial means of adding vital nutrients like nitrogen and potassium to soils.

Inorganic fertilizer is a global enterprise, one dominated by producers in the United States, China, India, Russia, Canada and Morocco. Nigeria has several fertilizer factories that produce varieties of nitrogen fertilizer, but they export nearly everything to South America. As a result, the country is vulnerable to any break in the global supply chain.

The pandemic delivered a colossal blow.

When making and blending fertilizer, Nigeria imports phosphates mined in Morocco, shipping them to the port of Lagos. Over the first two months of the pandemic, as commercial activity froze, shipping companies reduced their ports of call in sub-Saharan Africa by roughly one-fifth, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Then, as regular shipping schedules resumed, Lagos was overwhelmed by a cargo backlog. Seeking easier passage, fertilizer manufacturers diverted shipments to Port Harcourt, about 370 miles down the coast. But rampant piracy in the area entailed higher costs for insurance and freight.

In March 2021, a massive container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal, closing that artery of trade and sending global shipping prices skyward. The cost of phosphates from Morocco delivered to Nigeria grew to more than $1,000 per ton, from $300 to $400.

“You had all those problems compounding supply,” said Gideon Negedu, executive secretary of the Fertilizer Producers and Suppliers Association of Nigeria.

Then, just as supply was recovering, Russia invaded Ukraine.

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Mr. Chubado, carrying two plastic shopping bags, hands money to a merchant in a busy market.
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Mr. Chubado buying vegetables. Peanut oil that he bought in the market cost double what it did a year earlier.

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One-story roofs stretch across an expanse of flat land under dark clouds.
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The fertilizer shortage has worsened this year in the area surrounding Gombe.

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A woman bends over to scoop rice from a tub in an outdoor market while another woman bends down next her with an open sack.
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Buying and selling rice at the Yola market. Farmers are shifting from staples like rice to crops like soybeans and peanuts, which need less fertilizer.

The Consequences of Conflict

For fertilizer producers, the most immediate effect of the war was its impact on energy prices.

Nitrogen fertilizers are made through a chemical process that consumes energy, typically natural gas. As the United States, Europe and other governments enforced sanctions against Russia — a major gas producer — the price rose.

The war also limited access to potash, an important source of potassium. Mining potash is a major industry in Belarus, a Russian ally. Even before the war in Ukraine, Belarus confronted international restrictions on its sales. Russia is another major supplier.

American and European sanctions on Russia and Belarus include exemptions intended to allow trade in agricultural commodities. But much of the potash coming out of Belarus — a landlocked country — has traditionally been shipped from Lithuania, which has barred rail access since last year.

Fertilizer manufacturers could not simply forgo phosphates and make products with the other key nutrients, nitrogen and potassium. Many crops require all three.

Mr. Negedu’s trade association represents 80 fertilizer blending plants and 500 large distributors around Nigeria. In pursuit of potash, the association pivoted to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, contending with stiff competition from much larger consumers of fertilizer from the United States and India, along with higher shipping rates.

For much of last year, a ton of phosphates moved from Canada to Nigeria ran $1,350 — a roughly fivefold increase over the price before 2020.

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Abba Musa, wearing a black beret, stands in front of a cluster of plastic fuel containers.
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Abba Musa, a roadside fuel vendor, waiting for customers in Yola. The Nigerian government ended subsidies for fuel this year, adding to farmers’ higher costs.

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A woman carries a container on her head in front of about two dozen goats and sheep and a crowd of people.
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A sheep and goat market in Gombe. Fewer people in northeastern Nigeria can now afford to eat meat.

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Workers tend to carcasses hanging in a row from an outdoor frame made of wooden posts.
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An abattoir in Gombe. The cost of meat has risen because livestock is typically fed with the husks of grains that depend on fertilizer.

Scarce Fertilizer

In the dusty city of Gombe, Kasim Abubakar, 28, a fertilizer merchant, contemplated his diminishing stocks with a deepening sense of dread.

It was July 2022, five months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the beginning of the peak season for farmers applying fertilizer. He placed an order for 700 bags of urea — a form of nitrogen — with a Nigerian manufacturer.

Not until October, four months after the peak season, did he finally receive his shipment.

This year, Mr. Abubakar ordered 2,100 bags of NPK, a mixture of the three primary nutrients, from an agribusiness supplier in Lagos. He prepaid the full balance — 48 million naira, or about $61,000.

Several weeks later, a sales manager informed him that production had been halted at the factory. Mr. Abubakar never received his shipment, while waiting four months for a refund.

With limited inventory, his sales have dropped by half. In the Gombe area, a shortage of fertilizer worsened.

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Kasim Abubakar leans against a stack of yellow sacks in a warehouse.
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Kasim Abubakar, a fertilizer merchant in Gombe, prepaid $61,000 for a shipment but never received it. His refund took four months.

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At the far end of a dirt clearing filled with smiling children and three women, Mohammad Sambo grins while holding a wooden staff against his right shoulder. Behind him is a small structure with a corrugated metal roof.
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Mohammed Sambo at home near Gombe. Since he could afford the rising fertilizer costs, he and his family doubled their planting this year to take advantage of premium prices.

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Tall stalks of corn nearly engulf six workers in a field.
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Members of Mr. Sambo’s family harvesting corn on his 370-acre farm.

For farmers with enough cash or credit to buy fertilizer, like Mohammed Sambo, 77, this was an opportunity. His 370-acre farm beyond Gombe is home to his four wives, seven children and 40 grandchildren. They live in mud houses that lack electricity and plumbing.

Last year, with fertilizer prices climbing, Mr. Sambo and his family cultivated only 74 acres. This year, fertilizer was even more expensive. Still, they nearly doubled their planting and increased their use of fertilizer, divining that — with other farmers retreating — the white beans, corn and millet they grew would command a premium.

They borrowed the money from a local seed company that provides technical advice along with fertilizer through a program forged by Mercy Corps, the international aid organization. The seed company waits for harvest until it collects its repayment.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Sambo’s family proudly displayed its towering corn plants. One of his sons pulled back the silk on a promising ear to reveal plump white kernels.

The family plans to fold its profits into expanding its acreage next year, eventually installing solar cells to generate electricity.

But those who cannot afford fertilizer are triply cursed. They lack adequate crops to feed their families. They have nothing to sell to raise cash. Yet they must buy food at wildly inflated prices.

Adamu Ibrahim, 28, a father of four, had hoped to sell some of his corn to generate funds to advance a crucial project — replacing the crumbling mud walls of his home. Poisonous snakes regularly slither through the holes, menacing his family. He has been adding sections of cinder block to bar their path.

But this year, he could afford to apply only half the usual fertilizer. On a recent afternoon, his corn slumped under the tropical sun.

“From the look of things,” he said, “my crop is only going to be for consumption.”

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An aerial view of a village surrounded by farmland that is veined with dirt roads and dotted here and there with trees.
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Farmland around Gombe, where Mr. Sambo plans to expand his acreage again next year.

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Mary Bitrus holds a plastic jug of water so her 3-year-old son can drink from hit while they and another young son are in a field.
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Mary Bitrus with her children while farming a plot outside Yola.

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Hauwa Kauna adjusts her long black head scarf in a field under a blue sky with billowing clouds.
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Another farmer, Hauwa Kauna, outside Yola.

Impossible Prices

By the time the cultivation season began in May, the ingredients for fertilizer were again widely available around the globe.

“The fertilizer market has stabilized,” Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, said by telephone from his office in Rome. “I don’t see that much of a problem at this point.”

But farmers in much of Africa were still consumed with problems.

The price of everything was going up. Fertilizer was available, but many farmers could not afford it. The cost of staple foods like corn, rice and beans was multiplying. So was the cost of meat, because livestock is typically fed with the husks of grains.

In Washington, the Fed had been raising interest rates. Investors were selling a variety of currencies in riskier nations like Nigeria and buying suddenly more rewarding assets bought and sold in dollars.

Over the last year, the Nigerian naira has surrendered nearly half its value against the dollar. The fall in local currencies increases the cost of all imports, including ingredients to make fertilizer.

Fertilizer prices were far from the only source of distress for farmers. Catastrophic floods last year wiped out crops in northeastern Nigeria. In Abuja, the capital, the government eliminated subsidies for fuel this year, increasing transportation costs.

And the inability to afford fertilizer makes it harder for rural families to overcome such challenges.

Last year, Aisha Hassan Jauro, 40, a mother of five in the city of Yola, borrowed 100,000 naira (about $126) from a local bank at a 20 percent rate of interest. She used the money to buy fertilizer, seeds and pesticides while planting corn on her five acres.

The floods destroyed her crop, leaving her with neither food nor cash, but still facing monthly loan payments of 17,500 naira (about $22).

She and her husband buy spices and grains at a downtown market and sell them at higher prices in their village, earning enough for a single meal per day. They reserve their most nutritious food for the children — fried dough made from cassava flour — while the grown-ups subsist on boiled weeds pulled from their courtyard.

They took their daughter out of university, where she was studying disaster management. Another daughter cannot begin seventh grade because they lack the 2,500 naira fee (about $3) for a required test.

The land beckons as a potential source of recovery. But this year, with fertilizer even more expensive, they planted nothing.

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Aisha Hassan and Aisha Hassan Jauro stand next to each other in front of a curtained wooden entryway.
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Aisha Hassan Jauro, right, with her daughter Aisha Hassan, who had to halt her university studies after floods destroyed the family’s crop in Yola last year.

The Final Days

For farmers accustomed to feeding their families, a trip to the market has become an indignity.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chubado arrived at the central market in Yola to supplement his meager harvest. He entered a labyrinth of muddy lanes choked with merchants. Boys wheeled wooden carts bearing eggs past women carrying baskets of plantains on their heads. Men stood over wooden tables, wielding knives to hack goats into fresh cuts of meat. The air was thick with the pungent smell of smoked fish, animal innards and diesel fuel, which powered clattering machines grinding corn into flour.

Mr. Chubado bought spinach, a purple onion and a bottle of peanut oil for cooking. The oil was double the price of a year earlier, so he bought half his usual amount.

He entered a stall where a man used a metal bowl to scoop urea from a large sack into two plastic shopping bags.

“I used to be able to buy a whole bag,” Mr. Chubado said sheepishly.

In Gombe, Juliana Bala has become acquainted with a sensation previously unknown in her 70 years — fear of hunger. She raised six children in a house provided by her husband’s employer, a local railroad. Neighbors traditionally shared meals with one another.

But on a recent morning, Ms. Bala endured the hourlong trek to her farm, down a muddy, rutted trail, and was horrified to see that her crop had been defiled. Thieves had stolen half her corn.

“I broke down and cried,” she said. “How can someone apply their hard work and energy and then they take your harvest?”

Nearly half her annual income was gone, threatening not only her ability to feed herself, her husband and the six grandchildren they are raising, but depriving them of the savings they needed to buy seeds and fertilizer the next year. They no longer eat meat or fish, subsisting on porridge made from yam and beans.

Crop theft was a new affliction. Ms. Bala took it as a sign — that there were enough hungry people to stray into criminality; that the warnings she had absorbed from her Lutheran preacher were coming to pass.

The final days were approaching, this the preacher had intoned for years. The pandemic was the first sign. The shortages of fertilizer and food — spurred by a war — seemed like the next one. And now, with half her crop disappeared, she could no longer feed the children.

“Life has changed,” Ms. Bala said. “I’m scared that this is the end of the world.”

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Juliana Bala rests an outstretched hand on a wall at her home while bending her other arm behind her.
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“I broke down and cried,” Juliana Bala said, after thieves stole half her corn in Gombe.

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A worker pours a bag of rice into a larger back in a storehouse with sacks stacked against the rear wall up to the low ceiling.
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Bagging rice in Gombe.

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Two men carry a stuffed sack between them out of a storehouse.
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Loading rice for transport.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/busi ... rtage.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

How America’s Diet Is Feeding the Groundwater Crisis

Post by kmaherali »

As dinner tables and snack menus feature far more chicken and cheese, farms are expanding where water is scarce.

America’s striking dietary shift in recent decades, toward far more chicken and cheese, has not only contributed to concerns about American health but has taken a major, undocumented toll on underground water supplies.

The effects are being felt in key agricultural regions nationwide as farmers have drained groundwater to grow animal feed.

In Arkansas for example, where cotton was once king, the land is now ruled by fields of soybeans to feed the chickens, a billion or so of them, that have come to dominate the region’s economy. And Idaho, long famous for potatoes, is now America’s largest producer of alfalfa to feed the cows that supply the state’s huge cheese factories.

Today alfalfa, a particularly water-intensive crop used largely for animal feed, covers 6 million acres of irrigated land, much of it in the driest parts of the American West.

These transformations are tied to the changing American diet. Since the early 1980s, America’s per-person cheese consumption has doubled, largely in the form of mozzarella-covered pizza pies. And last year, for the first time, the average American ate 100 pounds of chicken, twice the amount 40 years ago.


Chicken

Americans’ Changing Diet

80 pounds per person

60

Beef

Pork

40

Cheese

20

Yogurt

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

2020


Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Note: 5-year rolling average

It’s not just Americans eating more American-made meat and cheese. Exports of poultry and dairy have risen more than tenfold since 1980, thanks to America’s farming efficiency, combined with government subsidies and rising demand from countries like China. Exports of animal feed itself have soared, too, industry data show.

Most of America’s irrigated farmland grows crops that don’t directly feed humans but instead are used to feed animals or to produce ethanol for fuel. And most of that irrigation water comes from aquifers.

Those crops have expanded into areas that don’t have enough water to sustain them, affecting some important aquifers across the country by contributing to groundwater overuse. Aquifer depletion for animal feed is occurring in places including Texas, the Central Valley of California, the High Plains in Kansas, Arizona and other areas that lack enough water from rivers and streams to irrigate the crops.

Irrigated acreage for corn, about half of which goes toward animal feed, jumped sixfold between 1964 and 2017, federal numbers show. Irrigated acres for soybean, mostly used for animals, has jumped eightfold.

Close-up photo of a slice of cheese pizza, held by a person wearing a denim jacket.
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Cheese delivery system. Eric Helgas for The New York Times

Aerial view of the circular pattern of an industrial irrigation system in a field of bright green alfalfa.

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Alfalfa in Idaho. Matthew Hamon for The New York Times

“The seemingly simple task of deciding what to eat is, in reality, intricately woven into a complex tapestry of interconnected factors,” said Mesfin Mekonnen, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Alabama who studies the water footprint of food. While there’s been growing awareness of issues like greenhouse gas emissions from ranching and agriculture, he said, “water usage in food production is still an aspect that is not widely discussed.”

The toll on aquifers, which supply 90 percent of America’s water systems, has been devastating. A Times investigation this year revealed that many of those aquifers are being severely overtaxed by agriculture and industry, and that the federal government has left oversight to the states, where tangles of rules are failing to protect those aquifers.

Food choices have long led to debates not only about personal health, but also animal welfare, cultural expectations and the role of government regulations in shaping people’s diets. The damage that animal agriculture is doing to fragile aquifers, while less documented, is particularly important: The decline of the aquifers could affect what Americans eat, and potentially become a threat to America’s food supply.



DAIRY FARMERS HEAD TO THE DESERT

In the early 1990s, dairy farmers in California found themselves increasingly squeezed by suburban sprawl, rising costs and regulations. Some began looking for a new place to set up shop, and the criteria were simple: Cheap, wide open land. Fewer rules. And access to plenty of water.

For many farmers, the answer was easy.

“We liked Idaho,” said Arie Roeloffs, who left California. He opened a dairy farm with his in-laws a hundred miles from Boise and is now vice president of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.

Idaho now has about 700,000 dairy cattle, more than any other state save California and Wisconsin. That shift has transformed the countryside. Drive across the high desert of southern Idaho, a mostly barren landscape of pale-brown sagebrush, and you’ll find sprawling cattle yards and emerald-green fields of alfalfa, grown to support one of the largest collections of dairy farms and cheese factories in the United States.

The transformation is all the more striking for the harshness of the land. This part of Idaho, where the Snake River curves south and west around the Sawtooth Mountains, gets just 10 inches of rain a year. Pumping groundwater has helped Idaho accommodate the influx of dairy farms and feed crops.

Idahoans call this area the Magic Valley. “You put water to it,” said Steve Stuebner, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Water Resources, “and everything grows.”

But more than four-fifths of monitoring wells in Idaho have shown a significant decrease in water levels since 1980, according to data compiled by The New York Times. Some 79 percent of monitoring wells hit record lows in the past decade alone. Both figures are the highest in the country.


Boise

Idaho Falls

Snake River

Plain Aquifer

IDAHO

MAGIC VALLEY

Twin Falls

Area of detail



Boise

Idaho Falls

Snake River

Plain Aquifer

IDAHO

MAGIC VALLEY

Twin Falls

Area of detail




In the Magic Valley, alfalfa has become one of the most important crops.
Alfalfa Other crops
Map of a portion of Idaho depicting where alfalfa is grown, using bright pink clusters, and where other crops are grown, using pale yellow. It shows considerable alfalfa, particularly on the perimeter of an area described in the map as the Snake River Plain Aquifer..
And groundwater levels are in steep decline, a Times analysis found.
Declining Rising groundwater levels
A map of the same region of Idaho shows changes in groundwater levels. Declines are indicated with downward pointing red arrows, and increases with upward pointing blue arrows. There are 10 or so blue arrows as well as dozens of red ones that correspond roughly with crop-heavy areas..
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture CroplandCROS; New York Times analysis. Note: Map shows 2022 crops. Arrows signify statistically significant trends in groundwater levels since 1980.

The interplay between the Snake River and groundwater is complex, and there are several reasons that aquifer levels have been declining in recent decades, including not only overpumping but also changes in the way that farmers irrigate their fields. Nevertheless, today aquifer levels are far below where they were 50 years ago. And they continue to fall.

“We’ve been using more water than we’ve been putting back into the aquifer,” said Brian E. Olmstead, a member of the Idaho Water Resource Board and a former farmer. “Everybody thought, this was such a huge resource, we can’t ever deplete it.”

Since the 1990s, major international cheese producers like Glanbia of Ireland, Lactalis of France and Agropur of Canada have all bought or built processing plants in Idaho. Glanbia has four plants in the state, which use 4.3 billion pounds of milk a year.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Glanbia, Martha Kavanagh, said, “We are very conscious of the significance of the Magic Valley aquifer to our supply chain,” adding that the company is working with suppliers to reduce its environmental impact.

Idaho recently joined Wisconsin and California in an elite club: States that produce at least 1 billion pounds of cheese annually. If all the cheese made in Idaho were eaten in Idaho, the average Idahoan would need to consume more than 500 pounds a year.

UNCHARTED WATERS

A series on the causes and consequences of disappearing water.

America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow


Big Farms and Flawless Fries Are Gulping Water in the Land of 10,000 Lakes


A Colorado City Has Been Battling for Decades to Use Its Own Water


‘Monster Fracks’ Are Getting Far Bigger. And Far Thirstier.


Inside Poland Spring’s Hidden Attack on Water Rules It Didn’t Like
A bottle of Poland Spring water, upside down with water pouring out, pictured against a black background.

A Tangle of Rules to Protect America’s Water Is Falling Short


As Groundwater Dwindles, Powerful Players Block Change


Airlines Race Toward a Future of Powering Their Jets With Corn


Who Gets the Water in California? Whoever Gets There First.


The valley’s biggest city is Twin Falls, bordered on the north by the Snake River Canyon, which Evel Knievel tried to jump in 1974 riding what resembled a rocket. (He was not successful.) Now the city has a new claim to fame: It is the center of Idaho’s dairy industry. Chobani opened one of the country’s largest yogurt factories there in 2012. Glanbia, too, has a cheese processing plant in the city.

But each pound of cheese produced requires, on average, 10 pounds of milk. And the cows producing that milk need to eat high-protein foods, including alfalfa. In the Magic Valley, growing alfalfa can consume significantly more water than potatoes, barley or wheat, according to data compiled by the University of Idaho.

As the dairy industry has exploded through the Magic Valley, “it’s changed the crop rotation from low-water-use crops to high-water-use crops,” said Dean Stevenson, a farmer and member of the Idaho Water Resource Board.

A man wearing a baseball cap, purple plaid shirt and waders stands in a dark, cave-like space and gestures to water streaming down from above.

Image
Brian E. Olmstead in a Twin Falls tunnel carrying aquifer water. Matthew Hamon for The New York Times
An aerial landscape view shows water gushing from the side of a steep incline.

Image
Springwater near Twin Falls. Matthew Hamon for The New York Times

When asked about the dairy industry’s role in groundwater overuse, Rick Nearabout, chief executive officer of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, said his industry wasn’t Idaho’s only source of demand for alfalfa. Some is fed to beef cattle and some is exported.

He also said there were economic arguments for Idaho having a large dairy industry. The state’s relatively temperate climate is more comfortable for cows than places like Wisconsin, a fact that reduces costs because cattle can be kept in open lots instead of barns.

And low-cost dairy products have a social benefit, said Marissa Watson, vice president of sustainability for Dairy West, which represents farmers in Idaho and Utah. Dairy is “a really affordable protein,” particularly compared to less water-intensive but far costlier dairy alternatives like oat milk, she said. When food insecurity is part of the equation, Ms. Watson said, “you’re having a very different conversation.”

The Idaho State Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation, Sean Ellis, said that “using our natural resources, including water, to produce an abundance of crops makes a lot of sense.”

Water regulators are struggling to respond to the decline in the state’s aquifer. The state has invested millions of dollars to direct more water into the aquifer, especially during wet years. But it’s not enough. This past April, officials said farmers had to reduce groundwater use or risk mandatory cuts.

“There’s two kinds of people in the desert: those that fought for their water, and those that don’t have any water,” Mr. Olmstead of the water board said. “We can’t keep using more than we have.”



THE CHICKEN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Arkansas is America’s chicken headquarters.

It is home to the world’s biggest chicken company, Tyson, and also to thousands of producers that get baby chicks and feed from Tyson and fatten them up for Tyson to turn into chicken breasts, chicken nuggets and chicken patties.

Overall, chickens are the state’s largest agricultural commodity, valued at an estimated $6.3 billion last year, more than double the value just a decade ago.

As a result, soybean acres have soared over the decades, becoming the state’s largest row crop, nearly all grown on land irrigated with groundwater. Corn acreage has increased as well, also using groundwater. Taken together, corn, soybean, and water for poultry operations account for more than half the state's water use. Then there’s the state’s most famous crop: rice, also grown with groundwater.

That has stressed what was once a bountiful aquifer.

In fact, when Scott Matthews’s ancestors settled here a century ago, there was so much water under the ground that you could drive a pipe into the earth and strike water.

No more. He now describes the area as “ground zero” of the state’s groundwater woes. “Our aquifer is slowly depleting every year,” he said. “It’s going away.”

Almost two-thirds of the state’s aquifer-monitoring wells show a decrease in water levels since 1980, one of the worst rates in the country.


MISSOURI

Area

of detail

TENNESSEE

ARKANSAS

Memphis

Little Rock

Mississippi River Valley

Alluvial Aquifer

MISSISSIPPI

LOUISIANA

Jackson



MISSOURI

Area

of detail

TENNESSEE

ARKANSAS

Memphis

Little Rock

Mississippi River Valley

Alluvial Aquifer

MISSISSIPPI

LOUISIANA

Jackson




Animal feed dominates parts of the Mississippi River Valley in Arkansas and nearby states.
Soy Corn Other crops
Map depicting concentrations of soybean crops (in orange), corn (in yellow) and other crops (in pale yellow) in portions of of Arkansas, Tennessee and other states along a stretch of the Mississippi River. The map also identifies the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, which stretches from southeast Missourito Louisiana.
The effect on aquifers has been stark across the region.
Declining Rising groundwater levels
A map of the same region shows changes in groundwater levels, with downward-pointing red arrows indicating declines, and upward-pointing blue arrows indicating increases. Red arrows cover much of the map.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture CroplandCROS; New York Times analysis. Note: Map shows 2022 crops. Arrows signify statistically significant trends in groundwater levels since 1980.
This part of the Mississippi River Valley is not a dry, arid place. It rains plenty, but in winter. Not when the crops need it. Rivers lace the land, but farms have popped up far from rivers.

So, farmers have long relied on the shallow Alluvial Aquifer for water in the scorching summers. They’ve flooded rice fields some years, rotated with corn and soy the following years.

It adds up to hundreds of gallons of water used to produce each grocery-store rotisserie bird. Though beef remains the most water intensive meat, the huge increase in consumption of less expensive chicken contributes to the high water intensity of the American diet.

The Cost in Water of Some Popular Foods

Beef

2,110

Almonds

560 gallons of water per pound

Cheese

520

Pork

490

Chicken

410

Eggs

230

Lentils

190

Beans

180

Green peas

90


Source: Mekonnen, et. al., Environment International (2019) and a forthcoming study. Includes water from all sources.

The Eat Lancet Commission, a global panel of health and climate experts that has recommended modifying people’s diets in order to reduce health risks and to help protect the environment, suggests roughly 25 pounds of chicken consumption a year, about a fourth of what the average American eats.

Industrially grown chicken has a number of environmental issues, including the vast amounts of chicken waste it produces, which can contribute to water pollution. The industry, however, correctly points out that the effects of chicken production on climate emissions and water use are far lower, per calorie, than those of beef, lamb and dairy.

“We are proud of our state’s livestock and poultry industry,” Wes Ward, the Arkansas secretary of agriculture, said in response to questions about the effects of the industry on groundwater. He also noted the industry’s role in “a healthy human diet.”

Drive across the Mississippi River to Western Tennessee and the land turns to softly undulating hills. Oak trees cluster together. The houses stand apart. There are small pastures of sheep and cattle. “God knows your thoughts,” reads a yard sign.

A bald man in a dark gray T-shirt and khaki pants sits on a large, rusty pipe in the middle of a field, looking into the distance to the left.

Image
Scott Matthews and a deep-water pump on his land. Rory Doyle for The New York Times

View of a water reservoir, mostly dry, with caked mud stretching to the horizon broken only by a small amount of water in the distance, at the bottom of the reservoir.

Image
A new reservoir on Mr. Matthews’s property. Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Turn left on a narrow road, and the landscape changes. Eight airplane-hangar-size barns stand in a row, and eight more across the road. A Tyson sign at the entry reads, “No admittance.” “Bio secure area,” reads another. Tyson is expanding in the state.

“It’s not a farm” said Thomas Gorden, who lives less than a mile away. “It’s a factory.” Sometimes the air is thick with the smell of chicken manure, an odor that Mr. Gorden described as “stout.”

In a Tennessee court, the Southern Environmental Law Center, which litigates on environmental issues, is challenging some of the federal benefits that chicken farming receives, such as loan guarantees, asserting that they are illegally “subsidizing industrial chicken operations.” Tyson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

For his part, Mr. Matthews, the Arkansas farmer, said he was taking steps to conserve groundwater, with financial support from the government. He has turned some of his farmland into a pond to catch the rains and built narrow ditches along his fields to catch what water runs off.

All this because there may not be enough free water left underground for long. “You can always look in hindsight and say things should have been done different. But who actually knew?” he said. “It’s a business.”

Exterior shot of a weathered building featuring a window with an advertising decal featuring a large chicken sandwich and red uppercase lettering that reads, “chicken sandwich.” Beneath the window is a wooden bench painted a dirty red, and above it a moss-streaked metal awning.

Image
Rory Doyle for The New York Times

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kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Drought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally

Post by kmaherali »

The crisis, worsened partly by climate change, has been accompanied by soaring food prices and could have consequences for hunger, elections and migration worldwide.

Image
The shrinking Lake Titicaca, between Peru and Bolivia in the Andes, is Latin America’s largest freshwater basin.Credit...Claudia Morales/Reuters

Pandemic. War. Now drought.

Olive groves have shriveled in Tunisia. The Brazilian Amazon faces its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, pushing millions more into hunger after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a vital trade artery, doesn’t have enough water, which means fewer ships can pass through. And the fear of drought has prompted India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, to restrict the export of most rice varieties.

The United Nations estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. “Droughts operate in silence, often going unnoticed and failing to provoke an immediate public and political response,” wrote Ibrahim Thiaw, head of the United Nations agency that issued the estimates late last year, in his foreword to the report.

The many droughts around the world come at a time of record-high global temperatures and rising food-price inflation, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, involving two countries that are major producers of wheat, has thrown global food supply chains into turmoil, punishing the world’s poorest people.


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In 2023, the price of rice, staple grain for the global majority, was at its highest level since the global financial crisis of 2008, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Some of the current abnormally dry, hot conditions are made worse by the burning of fossil fuels that cause climate change. In Syria and Iraq, for instance, the three-year-long drought would have been highly unlikely without the pressures of climate change, scientists concluded recently. The arrival last year of El Niño, a natural, cyclical weather phenomenon characterized by warmer-than-normal temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean, has also very likely contributed.

Memories of the last El Niño, between 2014 and 2016, are fresh. That time, Southeast Asia witnessed a sharp decline in rice yields, pushing millions of people into food insecurity.

What’s different this time is record levels of hunger, on the heels of an economic crisis stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, compounded by wars in Ukraine and Gaza. A record 258 million people face what the United Nations calls “acute hunger,” with some on the brink of starvation.

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Two people stand on rocks and outcroppings along the steep wall of a large well that appears to have been carved from raw stone. One person clings to a rusty pipe while descending into the well.
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Descending into a nearly dry village well to draw water in western India in May.Credit...Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a research group funded by the United States government, estimates that the ongoing El Niño will affect crop yields on at least a quarter of the world’s agricultural land.

If the past is any guide, said researchers from FewsNet, a research agency funded by the U.S. govenment, El Niño combined with global climate change could dampen rice yields in Southeast Asia, a region where rice is central to every meal.

Rice is acutely vulnerable to the weather, and governments are, in turn, acutely vulnerable to fluctuations in rice prices. This helps to explain why Indonesia, facing elections this year, moved to shore up rice imports recently. It also explains why India, also facing elections this year, imposed a range of export duties, minimum prices and outright export bans on its rice.

India’s rice export ban is a precautionary measure. The government has long kept large stocks in reserve and offered rice to its poor at deep discounts. The export restrictions further help keep prices low and, in a country where hundreds of millions of voters subsist on rice, they dampen political risks for incumbent lawmakers.


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But India is the world’s largest rice exporter, and its restrictions are being felt elsewhere. Rice prices have soared in countries that have come to depend on Indian rice, like Senegal and Nigeria.

Earlier El Niños have also been bad news for maize, or corn, in two regions that rely on it: Southern Africa and Central America. That’s bad for small farmers in those regions, many of whom already live hand-to-mouth and are struggling with already high food prices.

Droughts in Central America affect more than food. In a region where violence and economic insecurity drive millions of people to try to migrate north to the United States, one recent study found that drought can press a heavy finger on the scale. Unusually dry years were associated with greater levels of migration from Central America to the United States, that study found.

Along the Panama Canal, dry conditions forced the shipping giant, Moller-Maersk, to say on Thursday that it would bypass the canal entirely and use trains instead. Farther south, a drought in the Brazilian Amazon has made drinking water scarce and stalled critical river traffic because of extremely low water levels.

Brazil’s drought poses more far-reaching dangers, too. A healthy Amazon rainforest is a huge storehouse of carbon, but not if heat and drought kill trees and fuel wildfires. “If that goes into atmosphere as greenhouse gases, that can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the global climate,” said Philip Fearnside, a biologist at the Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil. “Not just the Amazon.”

Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team. More about Somini Sengupta

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Re: WORLD FOOD AND WATER CRISIS

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Food Experts Predict ‘Imminent’ Famine in Northern Gaza

The warning came amid an Israeli raid on Al-Shifa Hospital. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed to send military and humanitarian officials to Washington to hear the Biden administration’s concerns.

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Palestinian children waiting in line last month in Beit Lahia, Gaza, for food provided by donors.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The acute food shortage in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip has become so severe that “famine is imminent” and the enclave is on the verge of a “major acceleration of deaths and malnutrition,” a report from a global authority on food security and nutrition said on Monday.

The group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, which was set up in 2004 by U.N. agencies and international relief groups, has sounded the alarm about famine only twice before: in Somalia in 2011 and in South Sudan in 2017.

The warning came as Israeli forces again raided Al-Shifa Hospital in the northern part of the enclave on Monday, in an operation that they said had been aimed at senior Hamas officials who had regrouped on the premises, setting off an hourslong battle that both sides said had resulted in casualties.

The raid at Al-Shifa, in Gaza City, raised questions about the level of control that Israeli forces have over northern Gaza. In December, the Israeli military said it was nearing “full operational control” there.

Taken together, the fighting and the severe food shortage underlined the chaos and desperation in Gaza after 23 weeks of war. The United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres, renewed his call on Monday for “an immediate humanitarian cease-fire” and said that the report on imminent famine was “an appalling indictment of conditions on the ground for civilians.”

As Israeli negotiators arrived in Qatar for a new round of talks on a cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas and its allies, President Biden had a phone conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday, according to Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser.

Mr. Biden relayed that he was “deeply concerned” about the prospect of Israel’s next phase in the war, an incursion into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, which is filled with families displaced from other parts of the territory, Mr. Sullivan said during a news briefing.

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Mr. Netanyahu agreed to send a team of military and humanitarian officials to Washington to hear the administration’s concerns, according to Mr. Sullivan. Mr. Biden, who asked Mr. Netanyahu for the visit, also requested that the Israeli delegation offer an alternative proposal to target senior Hamas leaders without a major invasion.

The call occurred as the global initiative’s report stressed that as many as 1.1 million people in Gaza would most likely experience “catastrophic” shortages of food. The group said the continued fighting and aid organizations’ lack of access to northern Gaza, the first part of the territory that Israeli forces invaded in October after the attack by Hamas, had made conditions particularly acute there.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, pushed back on the report, calling it an “out-of-date picture” that “does not take into account the latest developments on the ground,” including major humanitarian initiatives last week. He also said that Israel was taking “proactive measures” to expand aid delivery in northern Gaza.

In recent weeks, some foreign leaders have been increasingly blunt in blaming Israel for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. At the opening of a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza in Brussels, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, accused Israel of “provoking famine.”

Starvation is being used as “a weapon of war,” he said.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, rejected Mr. Borrell’s criticism, saying that the country allowed extensive aid in by air, land and sea.

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Three women and two young children on a street filled with debris.
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Palestinians fled an area in central Gaza City during airstrikes on Monday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Across the Gaza Strip, the severe shortages of food and other basic goods come amid Israeli’s bombardment and a near-total blockade. The central and southern parts of the territory also face a risk of famine by July if the worst-case scenarios come to pass, the Integrated Food Security group said.

In December, the group said that famine could occur within six months in Gaza unless the fighting stopped immediately and more humanitarian supplies made it into the territory. “Since then, the conditions necessary to prevent famine have not been met,” the report said.

The vast majority of the people in Gaza have been forced from their homes by the war, and many were once again on the move on Monday after the Israeli military ordered civilians to leave the area near Al-Shifa Hospital.

The military said it had launched the Monday raid on the hospital based on new intelligence that Hamas officials were operating from the facilities. It came four months after Israeli forces stormed the complex and found a tunnel shaft they said supported their contention that the armed group had used it to conceal military operations. Since then, Israel has withdrawn many troops from northern Gaza and has shifted the focus of its invasion to the south.

The military said its forces killed 20 militants during the operations on Monday, including a senior Hamas official it identified as Faiq Mabhouh, the head of operations for the internal security forces of the Hamas government in Gaza. He was “armed and hiding in a compound” at the hospital, Israel said.

(Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, confirmed on Monday that Israel had also killed Hamas’s deputy commander, Marwan Issa, this month.)

Israel has said that the hospital complex doubles as a Hamas military command center, calling it one of many examples of civilian facilities that the militants use to shield their activities. U.S. spy agencies have said that their own intelligence indicates that Hamas and another Palestinian group used Al-Shifa to command forces and hold some hostages taken during the Oct. 7 attacks.

The hospital and the surrounding area also house about 30,000 patients, medical workers and displaced civilians, and a number of people were killed and wounded in the raid on Monday, the Gazan Health Ministry said.

By midday, about 15 Israeli tanks and several bulldozers were on the hospital’s grounds, said Alaa Abu al-Kaas, who was staying at the hospital with her father, who was being treated.

“The fear and terror are really eating us alive,” she said in a phone call from a corridor of one of the hospital’s buildings where she was hiding. Her voice was barely audible amid loud booms and explosions.

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People sit in a cart pulled by a donkey along a street.
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Palestinians leaving the vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital on Monday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. al-Kaas, 19, said that in the predawn hours Monday, she heard shots and the sound of tanks before Israeli soldiers, using loudspeakers, ordered people in the complex to stay inside and close the windows. She said that Israeli forces told people that they would be moved to the area of Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, although it was not immediately clear when or how. Israel said it had sought to create a humanitarian “safe zone” in Al-Mawasi, although civilians have found little shelter there.

Ms. al-Kaas said that she had also seen Israeli soldiers holding several people, their hands bound and clothes partly stripped off, in the courtyard of the hospital complex. She added that bodies of people who had apparently been shot were lying in the courtyard. Her account could not be independently confirmed.

“We are just sitting here,” she said, “waiting for them to evacuate us out of here.”

Reporting was contributed by Yan Zhuang, Ameera Harouda, Hiba Yazbek, Myra Noveck, Abu Bakr Bashir and Zach Montague.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3
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