Fishing and the future of coral reefs

New fishery regulations based on science are needed in the Caribbean to give coral reefs a fighting chance against climate change, according to an international study published today. The study, led by University of Queensland researchers, reveals that Caribbean coral reefs are experiencing mounting pressure from global warming, local pollution and over-fishing of herbivorous fish. Study author Dr Yves-Marie Bozec, from UQ's School of Biological Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said herbivorous parrotfish were needed because they eat seaweed, which can smother coral and prevent corals from recovering. "While several countries in the Caribbean have taken the bold step of banning the fishing of parrotfish (including Belize, Bonaire, Turks and Caicos Islands), parrotfish fisheries remain in much of the region," Dr Bozec said. The research team analysed the effects of fishing on parrotfish and combined this with an analysis of the role of parrotfish on coral reefs. "We conclude that unregulated fisheries will seriously reduce the resilience of coral reefs," Dr Bozec said. "However, implementation of size limits and catch limits to less than 10 per cent of the fishable stock provide a far better outlook for reefs, while also allowing the fishery to persist." Study co-author Professor Peter Mumby from UQ's School of Biological Sciences said a number of countries wanted to modify their fisheries to reduce impacts on reefs. "What we've done is identify fisheries' policies that might help achieve this," Professor Mumby said. The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argues that science should be used to revise current fisheries practices for herbivorous fish. The authors have provided tools to help fisheries managers make such changes. "Ultimately, the more we do to maintain healthy coral reefs, the more likely it is that fishers' livelihoods will be sustained into the future," Professor Mumby said. "We already know that failure to maintain coral habitats will lead to at least a threefold reduction in future fish catches." Explore further: Coral Reefs: Ever Closer to Cliff's Edge More information: Tradeoffs between fisheries harvest and the resilience of coral reefs, PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1601529113  Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences   Provided by: University of Queensland   http://phys.org/news/2016-04-fishing-future-coral-reefs.html

Permaculture Design for International Development

Here is the announcement for Quail Springs permaculture design certification (PDC). course for International Development at Quail Springs this May.

We just heard there is a chance that Steve Gliessman, the grandfather of Agroecology, may be able to teach. We will get confirmation in April as to whether he will be able teach here this year.

www.quailsprings.org

Permaculture Design Course for International Development

Quail Springs Permaculture

Southern California, USA

May 9-22, 2016

For More Information

© Climate War Room

Which Ocean Species Will Outlast the Rising Acidity of Seawater?

Many of the projected effects of climate change on the world’s oceans are already visible, such as melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. But invisible changes may be the most threatening to human food sources, beginning with the tiny species like plankton that inhabit the bottom of the oceans’ food chain.

Strength in numbers: A satellite’s view
of billions of E. huxleyi, blankets of tiny
plankton floating off the east coast of
southern England. Credit: NASA

As emissions from human activities increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, they, in turn, are modifying the chemical structure of global waters, making them more acidic.

Many researchers have speculated that most aquatic species won’t be able to adapt in time to survive the acidification that has already begun, but there are some who are more optimistic. One of them is Jennifer Sunday, a postdoctoral ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Canada’s Simon Fraser University.

“You hear people say species aren’t going to adapt in time,” she explained in an interview, “but I just knew that we don’t really know that. This really motivated me to start thinking about a study to test this. We can and did put some science and data to this question.”

Sunday and her team published a review earlier this year in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, aiming to help researchers improve their chances of finding potential survivors. It suggests that more studies should focus on identifying species with enough genetic variety to produce a mutant that can adapt.

Sunday feels that the better researchers get at searching for adapters, the more will be found.

The process that creates this risk is swift and globe-spanning. Oceans absorb roughly a quarter of the rising CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, so as that concentration increases, the oceans absorb more of the gas. In the past 150 years, human-induced climate change has changed the ocean acidity from roughly pH 8.3 to pH 8. (In the pH scale, 1 is most acidic, 7 is neutral and 14 is basic, or least acidic).

“It’s anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster than anything we’ve seen over the last million years,” said Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer and senior researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “That’s just according to our good records.” And acidity is only expected to rise.

“By the end of this century,” Feely said, “projections are an increase by another 100 to 130 percent.”

Which tiny sea creatures can win the lottery?Changes in pH levels can have massive effects on marine life, a fact that has led many scientists to believe that most species can’t withstand large increases in acidification. When CO2 mixes with ocean waters, it binds calcium molecules that are usually free for marine creatures to build shells. The more acidic waters can also corrode existing shells.

Sunday isn’t the first to try and isolate survivor species. Several teams worldwide have already been exploring the potential of marine life species to adapt to predicted climate changes.

In 2009, a European team published their research on the tiny circular plankton Emiliania huxleyi, made up of light-reflecting mineralized calcium ovals. These tiny plankton sometimes float in populations so large, they’ve been spotted from outer space.

Looking at strains of the plankton under varying CO2 levels, researchers found that while some plankton had difficulties forming their shells when the water was more acidic, others did not, causing researchers to speculate that the plankton might be able to use another form of calcium to substitute in shell making. Other studies have shown that certain species thought incapable of evolving quickly can, in fact, rapidly adapt.

Evolution is like a lottery. The faster a species reproduces, the greater the number of unique ticket combinations it creates in the genes of its offspring. For species that produce the right genetic mutation, their number is drawn and the prize is survival.

“This is particularly important when you want to look at a species’ ability to cope with change,” said Jennifer Pistevos, a master of research student at the Marine Biological Association, who studied clone populations of Celleporella hyalina, a tiny organism she found to have an amazing ability to reproduce in both more acidic and warmer water conditions.

“Faster reproduction rates give us a chance to see how vulnerable a species is,” Pistevos said.

In 2012, Sunday and colleagues spanning three continents reviewed past studies, and based on this work, propose future research dedicated to efforts to locate adapters by incorporating more experimental evolution into the studies.

Experimental evolution identifies members of a species born with the winning genetic ticket instead of those who can come up with the correct number during their lifetime. Being born with the winning ticket means these individuals may be able to ride the acidifying tides in the kind of time frame needed—which is immediately.

Questions that can’t be answered in the labSunday and her team also suggest more work should consider a species’ response to multiple environmental changes, such as increased temperature and oxidation levels, as well as multiple stages of life. Currently, many studies only follow a species at a specific point in its members’ lives, such as infancy. Without tracking an organism over its life span and in a complicated and changing environment, it’s hard to say whether observed changes will translate into overall survival.

Although Sunday sees her work as laying the groundwork for less pessimistic predictions of the future fate of marine life, not everyone agrees that the approach is realistic. Aran Mooney, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who studies the effects of ocean acidification on Atlantic long-fin squid larvae, said some methods Sunday recommends are not practical for studying all species.

“Overall, the review is very good for us,” he said. “The authors point out some great goals and the limitations we face.” But for species like squid, Mooney said, Sunday’s suggestions are unlikely to be used.

“Measuring squid evolution in the lab might be doable to some extent,” Mooney said, “but it isn’t really possible to raise multiple generations or even young to adult—[they] don’t do all that well in captivity.”

Though Sunday agreed that predicting exactly how oceans will look in the future remains hard, researchers are starting to look in the right places. “The question just seemed too difficult before,” she said. “We wanted to put our advice out there so people could see it’s not impossible for species to adapt in time.”

“I do predict some species will adapt,” concluded Sunday, “but not all. Ultimately, it’s pretty shocking to think we’ll be losing species and it will be because of us.” More

The third in a series. To see the first two parts, click here and here.

 

© 2014

China Experiment in Permaculture Offers World Hope

China is the most populous and possibly one of the most diverse nations on the planet, with a population of over 1.3 billion people and 56 ethnic groups.

What each one of those people shares with the rest of the world, regardless of political, linguistic, economic, and existential differences, is the complete and utter dependence on the ability to find food. In China’s Loess Plateau, sustained generational farming had depleted the soil, leaving in its wake a textured landscape of dust. When winds came, the dust blew into cities, compromising air quality. In the rains, it washed down the valley, depositing more of the silt that gives the Yellow River its name. In 1995, scientists and engineers surveyed the land of the Loess Plateau in an attempt to determine what was causing the once fertile belt to be a thorn in the country’s. The results of their study led to an experiment in permaculture in China that offers hope to the world.

John D. Liu, Chinese American ecologist and documentary film-maker, documented the project in an award-winning film called Hope in a Changing Climate. In the film that Liu narrates, he reports that the first thing that the scientists discovered was a causal relationship between ecosystem destruction and human poverty. Where environmental degradation is severe, the population becomes trapped in a downward spiral. Because they needed to eat to survive, generational subsistence farming had stripped the land bare in the Loess Plateau. In search of food for themselves and their flocks, farmers and their families continued to deplete the fertility of the surrounding ecosystem, further impoverishing themselves.

When scientists developed the plan to restore the ecosystem in China’s Loess Plateau, generational farmers had to be convinced that not farming was critical for their families’ long-term survival. To get buy in from the locals who did not understand how their families would eat if they were not allowed to farm, the government subsidized them and taught them how to do the work that would restore their land from a scarce dirt pit to a thriving ecosystem.

Around the world, populations are living a scarce subsistence lifestyle similar to the one that the citizens of China’s Loess Plateau used to live. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that besides fleeing for personal safety, the basic need for food and shelter is the primary motivation for people leaving their homes and becoming displaced. If there were a stable food supply and supportive ecosystem, then the motivation for the world’s most vulnerable populations to move, would decrease. The UNHCR reports that competition for scarce resources triggers violence. If there were a way to restore resources so that people had food and a sense of power in their lives, the fuel for much of the world’s violence would be spent.

The permaculture experiment in China indeed offers hope to the world. Working with scientists, the local population terraced slopes, they planted trees, and they penned their herds so that the trees could grow without being eaten. Soon they found that their hillsides were green. Instead of letting the rains sheet off the mountains, the terraces collected the water and fed the delicate new roots systems, transforming the arid land into a booming garden. Liu reports that since he first visited the area in 1995, the people have seen a threefold increase in income and a profound sense of hope and empowerment. More

 

© 2014

Permaculture PDC in Palestine in September

Marda Permaculture Certification Course, Register Now!

Join us in SEPTEMBER for an exquisite opportunity to learn about permaculture principles and techniques whilst experiencing the culture, food and traditions of beautiful Palestine! And much more! Check out: Permaculture Design Course, 25 September – 10 October 2014

For more information click here

 

© 2014

Food shortages could be most critical world issue by mid-century

The world is less than 40 years away from a food shortage that will have serious implications for people and governments, according to a top scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Dr. Fred Davies

"For the first time in human history, food production will be limited on a global scale by the availability of land, water and energy," said Dr. Fred Davies, senior science advisor for the agency's bureau of food security. "Food issues could become as politically destabilizing by 2050 as energy issues are today."

Davies, who also is a Texas A&M AgriLife Regents Professor of Horticultural Sciences, addressed the North American Agricultural Journalists meeting in Washington, D.C. on the "monumental challenge of feeding the world."

He said the world population will increase 30 percent to 9 billion people by mid-century. That would call for a 70 percent increase in food to meet demand.

"But resource limitations will constrain global food systems," Davies added. "The increases currently projected for crop production from biotechnology, genetics, agronomics and horticulture will not be sufficient to meet food demand." Davies said the ability to discover ways to keep pace with food demand have been curtailed by cutbacks in spending on research.

"The U.S. agricultural productivity has averaged less than 1.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2007," he said. "More efficient technologies and crops will need to be developed—and equally important, better ways for applying these technologies locally for farmers—to address this challenge." Davies said when new technologies are developed, they often do not reach the small-scale farmer worldwide.

"A greater emphasis is needed in high-value horticultural crops," he said. "Those create jobs and economic opportunities for rural communities and enable more profitable, intense farming." Horticultural crops, Davies noted, are 50 percent of the farm-gate value of all crops produced in the U.S.

He also made the connection between the consumption of fruits and vegetables and chronic disease prevention and pointed to research centers in the U.S. that are making links between farmers, biologists and chemists, grocers, health care practitioners and consumers. That connection, he suggested, also will be vital in the push to grow enough food to feed people in coming years.

"Agricultural productivity, food security, food safety, the environment, health, nutrition and obesity—they are all interconnected," Davies said. One in eight people worldwide, he added, already suffers from chronic undernourishment, and 75 percent of the world's chronically poor are in the mid-income nations such as China, India, Brazil and the Philippines.

"The perfect storm for horticulture and agriculture is also an opportunity," Davies said. "Consumer trends such as views on quality, nutrition, production origin and safety impact what foods we consume. Also, urban agriculture favors horticulture." For example, he said, the fastest growing segment of new farmers in California, are female, non-Anglos who are "intensively growing horticultural crops on small acreages," he said. More

 

© 2014

Geoff Lawton's Permaculture Design Course (Online)

For Those Who May Be Interested

If you are interested in growing your own food and if you have a farm this course is excellent.

Last year saw the launch Geoff Lawton's first online Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course, with the hope of exponentially increasing our educational reach. It was a 'scary' undertaking, in that, being the first course, we were not sure what to expect.

But we are proud to share that the course brought an overwhelmingly positive response. I've been looking around the inner 'halls' of the course system and reading comment after positive comment, and I've seen many of the amazing designs the students submitted at the end of their training. The best news is that this course is reaching people who would otherwise never get to take a PDC course, due to remote locations, family and work commitments, health constraints, cost, etc. Doctors, lawyers, housewives, politicians, activists, nurses, rural farmers, urbanites, pilots, industrialists, even experienced Permaculture teachers - the list goes on - all are coming together in the same system to learn, share, network and cause ripples of influence we may never be able to measure.

This last weekend Geoff's second online PDC was opened for registrations - for the new and even more expansive 2014 course (we keep adding material!). This course is run only once per year, and the door for registrations closes this Sunday, April 6th, 2014. If you want to get onto this course, or if you know someone who should, there's only three days left before the door shuts until next year, and the course begins. More

If you're unsure of the value of this life-altering course, please take a few minutes to scan the many comments below this post: http://permaculturenews.org/2013/10/28/geoff-lawtons-online-permaculture-design-course-worth/

 

© 2014

Fisheries and Aquaculture Fact Sheet

The world fish catch is a measure of the productivity and health of the oceanic ecosystem that covers 70 percent of the earth's surface. The extent to which world demand for seafood is outrunning the sustainable yield of fisheries can be seen in shrinking fish stocks, declining catches, and collapsing fisheries.

Seafood plays a vital role in world food security. Roughly 3 billion people get about 20 percent of their animal protein from fishery products.

The world fish catch has hovered around 90 million tons over the last 20 years.

The wild fish catch per person has dropped dramatically, from 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13 kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low.

Over four fifths of the world’s fisheries are either considered fully exploited, with no room for safely increasing the catch, or they are already overfished and in need of rebuilding.

Small forage fish account for over half the supply of food fish in 36 countries, including the Maldives, the Philippines, and Ghana.

In 2012, world farmed fish production topped beef production for the first time in modern history.

China accounts for 60 percent of world farmed fish production.

Wild fish play a large role in the production of meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. Some 6 million tons of fishmeal and 1 million tons of fish oil are produced each year. Nearly all of the fishmeal is fed to farmed fish, pigs, and poultry; 74 percent of fish oil goes to fish farms.

Some aquacultural producers are scaling back. Between 1995 and 2007, the fishmeal content in shrimp feed dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent. The drop was even more dramatic for salmon, from 45 percent to 24 percent.

People will likely eat more fish from farms than from the wild in 2014, a historical milestone. As the world’s oceans are fished to their limits, any increase in world fish consumption will come from farms. Fish farming output is expected to increase 33 percent by 2021.

Well-managed marine reserves, where fishing is off-limits, help protect biodiversity and rebuild fish stocks. Fish catch and tourism revenue outside reserve boundaries often increase. More

 

© 2014

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

World agriculture is now facing challenges unlike any before. Producing enough grain to make it to the next harvest has challenged farmers ever since agriculture began, but now the challenge is deepening as new trends—falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures—join soil erosion to make it difficult to expand production fast enough.

As a result, world grain carryover stocks have dropped from an average of 107 days of consumption a decade or so ago to 74 days in recent years.

World food prices have more than doubled over the last decade. Those who live in the United States, where 9 percent of income goes for food, are largely insulated from these price shifts. But how do those who live on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder cope? They were already spending 50–70 percent of their income on food. Many were down to one meal a day before the price rises. Now millions of families routinely schedule one or more days each week when they will not eat at all.

What happens with the next price surge? Belt tightening has worked for some of the poorest people so far, but this cannot go much further. Spreading food unrest will likely lead to political instability. We could see a breakdown of political systems. Some governments may fall.

As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware of the trends that are undermining our food supply and thus our civilization. We know what we need to do.

There was a time when if we got into trouble on the food front, ministries of agriculture would offer farmers more financial incentives, like higher price supports, and things would soon return to normal. But responding to the tightening of food supplies today is a far more complex undertaking. It involves the ministries of energy, water resources, transportation, and health and family planning, among others. Because of the looming specter of climate change that is threatening to disrupt agriculture, we may find that energy policies will have an even greater effect on future food security than agricultural policies do. In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society.

On the demand side of the food equation, there are four pressing needs—to stabilize world population, eradicate poverty, reduce excessive meat consumption, and reverse biofuels policies that encourage the use of food, land, or water that could otherwise be used to feed people. We need to press forward on all four fronts at the same time.

The first two goals are closely related. Indeed, stabilizing population depends on eliminating poverty. Even a cursory look at population growth rates shows that the countries where population size has stabilized are virtually all high-income countries. On the other side of the coin, nearly all countries with high population growth rates are on the low end of the global economic ladder.

The world needs to focus on filling the gap in reproductive health care and family planning while working to eradicate poverty. Progress on one will reinforce progress on the other. Two cornerstones of eradicating poverty are making sure that all children—both boys and girls—get at least an elementary school education and rudimentary health care. And the poorest countries need a school lunch program, one that will encourage families to send children to school and that will enable them to learn once they get there.

Shifting to smaller families has many benefits. For one, there will be fewer people at the dinner table. It comes as no surprise that a disproportionate share of malnutrition is found in larger families.

At the other end of the food spectrum, a large segment of the world’s people are consuming animal products at a level that is unhealthy and contributing to obesity and cardiovascular disease. The good news is that when the affluent consume less meat, milk, and eggs, it improves their health. When meat consumption falls in the United States, as it recently has, this frees up grain for direct consumption. Moving down the food chain also lessens pressure on the earth’s land and water resources. In short, it is a win-win-win situation.

Another initiative, one that can quickly lower food prices, is the cancellation of biofuel mandates. There is no social justification for the massive conversion of food into fuel for cars. With plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars coming to market that can run on local wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 80¢ per gallon, why keep burning costly fuel at four times the price?

On the supply side of the food equation, we face several challenges, including stabilizing climate, raising water productivity, and conserving soil. Stabilizing climate is not easy, but it can be done if we act quickly. It will take a huge cut in carbon emissions, some 80 percent within a decade, to give us a chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. This means a wholesale restructuring of the world energy economy.

The easiest way to do this is to restructure the tax system. The market has many strengths, but it also has some dangerous weaknesses. It readily captures the direct costs of mining coal and delivering it to power plants. But the market does not incorporate the indirect costs of fossil fuels in prices, such as the costs to society of global warming. Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, noted when releasing his landmark study on the costs of climate change that climate change was the product of a massive market failure.

The goal of restructuring taxes is to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes so that the cost of climate change and other indirect costs of fossil fuel use are incorporated in market prices. If we can get the market to tell the truth, the transition from coal and oil to wind, solar, and geothermal energy will move very fast. If we remove the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, we will move even faster. 10

Although to some people this energy transition may seem farfetched, it is moving ahead, and at an exciting pace in some countries. For example, four states in northern Germany now get at least 46 percent of their electricity from wind. For Denmark, the figure is 26 percent. In the United States, both Iowa and South Dakota now get one fifth of their electricity from wind farms. Solar power in Europe can now satisfy the electricity needs of some 15 million households. Kenya now gets one fifth of its electricity from geothermal energy. And Indonesia is shooting for 9,500 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity by 2025, which would meet 56 percent of current electricity needs. More

 

© 2014

Increasing homogeneity of world food supplies warns of serious implications for farming and nutrition

A comprehensive new study of global food supplies confirms and thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected: over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown ever more similar -- by a global average of 36 percent -- and the trend shows no signs of slowing, with major consequences for human nutrition and global food security.

A comprehensive new study of global food supplies confirms and thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected: over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown ever more similar -- by a global average of 36 percent -- and the trend shows no signs of slowing, with major consequences for human nutrition and global food security.

"More people are consuming more calories, protein and fat, and they rely increasingly on a short list of major food crops, like wheat, maize and soybean, along with meat and dairy products, for most of their food," said lead author Colin Khoury, a scientist at the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which is a member of the CGIAR Consortium. "These foods are critical for combating world hunger, but relying on a global diet of such limited diversity obligates us to bolster the nutritional quality of the major crops, as consumption of other nutritious grains and vegetables declines."

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that growing reliance on a few food crops may also accelerate the worldwide rise in obesity, heart disease and diabetes, which are strongly affected by dietary change and have become major health problems, "even within countries still grappling with significant constraints in food availability." The study calls for urgent efforts to better inform consumers about diet-related diseases and to promote healthier, more diverse food alternatives.

The research reveals that the crops now predominant in diets around the world include several that were already quite important a half-century ago -- such as wheat, rice, maize and potato. But the emerging "standard global food supply" described by the study also consists of energy-dense foods that have risen to global fame more recently, like soybean, sunflower oil and palm oil. Wheat is a major staple in 97.4 percent of countries and rice in 90.8 percent; soybean has become significant to 74.3 percent of countries.

In contrast, many crops of considerable regional importance -- including cereals like sorghum, millets and rye, as well as root crops such as sweet potato, cassava and yam -- have lost ground. Many other locally significant grain and vegetable crops -- for which globally comparable data are not available -- have suffered the same fate. For example, a nutritious tuber crop known as Oca, once grown widely in the Andean highlands, has declined significantly in this region both in cultivation and consumption.

"Another danger of a more homogeneous global food basket is that it makes agriculture more vulnerable to major threats like drought, insect pests and diseases, which are likely to become worse in many parts of the world as a result of climate change," said Luigi Guarino, a study co-author and senior scientist at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, headquartered in Germany. "As the global population rises and the pressure increases on our global food system, so does our dependence on the global crops and production systems that feed us. The price of failure of any of these crops will become very high."

As the authors probed current trends in food consumption, they documented a curious paradox: as the human diet has become less diverse at the global level over the last 50 years, many countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, have actually widened their menu of major staple crops, while changing to more globalized diets.

"In East and Southeast Asia, several major foods -- like wheat and potato -- have gained importance alongside longstanding staples, like rice," Khoury noted. "But this expansion of major staple foods has come at the expense of the many diverse minor foods that used to figure importantly in people's diets."

The dietary changes documented in the study are driven by powerful social and economic forces. Rising incomes in developing countries, for example, have enabled more consumers to include larger quantities of animal products, oils and sugars in their diets. Moreover, urbanization in these countries has encouraged greater consumption of processed and fast foods. Related developments, including trade liberalization, improved commodity transport, multinational food industries, and food safety standardization have further reinforced these trends.

"Countries experiencing rapid dietary change are also quickly seeing rises in the associated diseases of overabundance," said Khoury. "But hopeful trends are also apparent, as in Northern Europe, where evidence suggests that consumers are tending to buy more cereals and vegetables and less meat, oil and sugar."

The researchers single out five actions that are needed to foster diversity in food production and consumption and thus improve nutrition and food security:

• Actively promote the adoption of a wider range of varieties of the major crops worldwide to boost genetic diversity and thus reduce the vulnerability of the global food system in the face of challenges that include climate change, rising food demand, and increased water and land scarcity. This action is especially important for certain crops, like banana, for which production is dominated by a very few, widely grown commercial varieties.
• Support the conservation and use of diverse plant genetic resources -- including farmers' traditional varieties and wild species related to crops -- which are critical for broadening the genetic diversity of the major crops. Key measures needed are more vigorous implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture to better safeguard and share these genetic resources internationally, and increased investment in crop breeding and related research.
• Enhance the nutritional quality of the major crops on which people depend -- for example, through crop breeding to improve the content of micronutrients like iron and zinc -- and make supplementary vitamins and other nutrient sources more widely available.
• Promote alternative crops that can boost the resilience of farming and make human diets healthier through research aimed at making these crops more competitive in domestic and international markets. Key measures include identifying and conserving nutritious locally grown "neglected and underutilized" crops, fostering their production potential through crop breeding, and increasing their use through awareness raising and policy.
• Foster public awareness of the need for healthier diets, based on better decisions about what and how much we eat as well as the forms in which we consume food.

This comprehensive new study, relying on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), encompassed more than 50 crops and over 150 countries (accounting for 98 percent of the world's population) during the period 1961-2009. In addition to CIAT and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, it involved researchers from Wageningen University in The Netherlands and the University of British Columbia in Canada.

"International agencies have hammered away in recent years with the message that agriculture must produce more food for over 9 billion people by 2050," said co-author Andy Jarvis, director of policy research at CIAT and leader for climate change adaptation with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which CIAT leads. "Just as important is the message that we need a more diverse global food system. This is the best way, not only to combat hunger, malnutrition, and over-nutrition, but also to protect global food supplies against the impacts of global climate change." More

 

©

Many Countries Reaching Diminishing Returns in Fertilizer Use

When German chemist Justus von Liebig demonstrated in 1847 that the major nutrients that plants removed from the soil could be applied in mineral form, he set the stage for the development of the fertilizer industry and a huge jump in world food production a century later.

Growth in food production during the nineteenth century came primarily from expanding cultivated area. It was not until the mid-twentieth century, when land limitations emerged and raising yields became essential, that fertilizer use began to rise.

The growth in the world fertilizer industry after World War II was spectacular. Between 1950 and 1988, fertilizer use climbed from 14 million to 144 million tons. This period of remarkable worldwide growth came to an end when fertilizer use in the former Soviet Union fell precipitously after heavy subsidies were removed in 1988 and fertilizer prices there moved to world market levels. After 1990, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the effort of its former states to convert to market economies led to a severe economic depression in these transition economies. The combined effect of these shifts was a four-fifths drop in fertilizer use in the former Soviet Union between 1988 and 1995. After 1995 the decline bottomed out, and increases in other countries, particularly China and India, restored growth in world fertilizer use.

As the world economy evolved from being largely rural to being highly urbanized, the natural nutrient cycle was disrupted. In traditional rural societies, food is consumed locally, and human and animal waste is returned to the land, completing the nutrient cycle. But in highly urbanized societies, where food is consumed far from where it is produced, using fertilizer to replace the lost nutrients is the only practical way to maintain land productivity. It thus comes as no surprise that the growth in fertilizer use closely tracks the growth in urbanization, with much of it concentrated in the last 60 years.

The big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States—account for more than half of world fertilizer consumption. In the United States, the growth in fertilizer use came to an end in 1980. China’s fertilizer use climbed rapidly in recent decades but has leveled off since 2007. In contrast, India’s fertilizer consumption is still on the rise, growing 5 percent annually. While China uses 50 million tons of fertilizer a year and India uses 28 million tons, the United States uses only 20 million tons. (See data.) More

 

Italy Calls for Food Security to Be U.N. Priority

ROME--Italy wants to shepherd efforts to make food security a priority for global policy makers, Prime Minister Enrico Letta said in his debut speech at the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday.

"We should address the root causes of the ills afflicting our world rather than limit ourselves to the side effects," Mr. Letta said. "The time has come to launch a new global consensus on food," he said.

In 2008, Italy, with limited financial firepower due to chronic fiscal problems, tried to make food security a signature theme at the Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, Italy, prodding the largest economies to pledge as much as $15 billion for the cause. The global financial crisis then commanded vast public resources and attention, even though the serious spike in basic food prices that helped trigger the so-called Arab Spring sparked fear that easy monetary policies in developed economies would trigger runaway inflation in basic staples.

Commodity prices have since stabilized, according to a price-monitoring index set up by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome.

Mr. Letta said that the 2015 Expo, or world's fair, in Milan should be a springboard for global initiatives, floating the idea that a multilateral pact might be reached there.

The Milan Expo, whose slogan is "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life," aims to draw 20 million visitors interested in issues linked to sustainability. The event should be seized upon to create a Milan Protocol, modelled on the Kyoto Protocol of the late 1990s that covers environmental issues, with nutritional education, sustainable farming practices and food waste as its cardinal points, according to the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, a think tank backed by Barilla SpA, the pasta maker.

"Italy, with its rich food culture and heritage, is well-placed to show leadership in tackling the world's global food issues," said Danielle Nierenberg, an advisory board member at the Center.

Italy is also home to the U.N.'s main food-related agencies, the World Food Program, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the FAO, which after decades of advising farmers on how to boost yields is beginning to try to influence retail supply chains in an effort to reduce what it says is the waste of one-third of global food production. More

 

Seeing Food As A Commons Opens Up Creative New Possibilities

What would the world look like if we began to re-conceptualize food as a commons? Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a Commons: Reframing the Narrative of the Food System.”

The piece is impressive for daring to imagine how the world’s estimated 668 million hungry people might eat, and how all of us would become healthier, if we treated more elements of the food production and distribution system as commons. Instead of managing food as a private good that can only be produced and allocated through markets, re-conceptualizing food as a commons helps us imagine “a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centered food system,” writes Vivero Pol.

One reason that the commons reframing is so useful is that it helps us see the ubiquity of enclosures in the food system. We can begin to see the galloping privatization of farmland, water, energy and seeds. We can see the concentration of various food sectors and the higher prices and loss of consumer sovereignty that comes from oligopoly control.

Enclosure is snatching shared resources from us and preventing us from managing them to maximize access and good nutrition. This is often known these days as “resource grabbing,” as companies and national governments race to seize as many abundant, cheap natural resources as they can on an international scale. This is one reason for the many pernicious enclosures of land commons in Africa and Latin America in recent years. There is a huge exodus from traditional and indigenous lands as China, Saudi Arabia, Korea, hedge funds and others buy up natural resources. These enclosures are moving us “from diversity to uniformity, from complexity to homoegeneity, and from richness to impoverishment,” writes Vivero Pol.

Strangely, “no one has really questioned the nature of food as a private good, produced by private inputs or privately harvested in enclosed areas of the world." Yet asking such a question helps us to see why massive hunger can persist with food abundance. The ethic of “no money, no food” means that only those with sufficient "consumer demand" are entitled to food. And even then, good health is no guarantee because the industrialized food model actively promotes expensive processed foods that are either non-nutritious or actively harmful to our health, but more lucrative to companies.

It helps to remember that many aspects of food are already considered commons, notes Vivero Pol. For example, fish stocks, unpatented genetic resources, wild fruits, recipes, agricultural knowledge and food safety regulations cannot be owned and can be harvested and used by anyone or by bounded commons.

Most cultivated food, however, is generally a private good, which means that food is vulnerable to being traded, hoarded and sold for competing uses (e.g., biofuels, animal feed) if it can fetch more money. In the classic economists’ formulation, food that is privatized and commoditized can be made “excludable” and “rival,” and this in practice tends to override any moral entitlements or human rights claims over food.

This means that private control has enormous public consequences. If people go hungry because they can’t afford food, they suffer diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. Their psychological health suffers. They may die of malnutrition. This of course has diverse economic, political and social effects that an economist would consider an unfortunate but inexorable “externality” for which buyers and sellers have no responsibility. But it is quite obvious that such are the predictable outcomes of the commoditization of food.

So how might we convert privately owned food production into more of a public good? (Vivero Pol uses “public good” and “commons” interchangeably, while acknowledging that the former term is used in economic contexts and the latter in sociological contexts. But I would suggest that the two terms should be emphatically separated to make clear that the commons has generative capacities and social grounding that a "public good" does not.)

First, we should apply the commons template to our food production system and enumerate the harms caused by enclosures. As Vivero Pol writes, these harms include: “excessive commodification of food, with high pricing, laws and private enclosure as main barriers to fully enjoying those vital resources”; irregular private land titling, land grabbing and land evictions…”; “excessive patents of life, biopiracy and patented GMOs”; “the concentration in agri-food chains in a few transnationals”; and enclosure schemes such as “the Carbon Sequestration Initiative,” the REDD+ and the Payment for Environmental Services.”

Once we regard food as a commons, we can begin to see that everybody ought to have a human right to food. “Another implication would be that food should be kept out of trade agreements dealing with pure private goods,” writes Vivero Pol. We would also need to develop an international legal framework to regulate food as a global level, and guarantee everyone a minimum amount of food as a “universal Basic Food Entitlement.” More

 

The Refractometer - An Indispensable Monitoring Tool

The Refractometer - An Indispensable Monitoring Tool. from NTS Health on Vimeo.

 

Climate change may reduce crop production by 50% in some countries, says environmentalist

A former Bolivian Ambassador to United Nations said this in Lagos on Friday.

Climate change could reduce yields from rain-fed agriculture by up to 50 per cent in some countries by 2020.

Pablo Solon, former Bolivian Ambassador to United Nations, stated this, Friday, at the inaugural Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF)’s Sustainable Academy in Lagos.

“We have to recognize that we are part of nature, that our future is linked with the future of earth,” said Mr. Solon, Executive Director, Focus on the Global South.

Two-thirds of all proven fossil fuel reserves would have to be left “unburned” if global warming will be held for two degrees Celsius, according to the International Energy Agency.

Mr. Solon explained the magnitude of the temperature rise by stating that a one degree rise in the normal body temperature could lead to fever.

The event themed ‘Climate Change and the Looming Food Crisis’ had already concluded two sessions, earlier in the week, in Abuja and Benin City.

Nnimmo Bassey, HOMEF’s Director, said that global warming has become a major concern in Nigeria and the rest of the world, with large numbers of people still ignorant about it.

“No doubt people recognize that weather events such as rainfall and flooding are getting more intense. They can even tell you the rhythms of the weather have become unpredictable,” said Mr. Bassey.

“However, when it comes to saying what is responsible for climate change, the answers taper out. If we do not know the cause and those responsible, it is doubtful that we can solve the problem,” he added.

Mr. Bassey said that effective communication of climate change and the looming food crisis will help “unpack the problem.”

“We hope that concepts like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD), Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and other market-based false solutions would be exposed for what they are,” Mr. Bassey said.

“Projects like Eko Atlantic City must be interrogated as a climate challenge, not a solution, recognizing the fact of sea level rise and the low-lying nature of Nigeria’s vulnerable coastline,” he added.

Mr. Bassey further stated that temperature increases of the magnitude currently experienced was now a possibility because of refusal of polluting nations to commit to measurable and verifiable emissions cut.

“Africa is poised to heat up much more than other regions,” Mr. Bassey continued.

“Continuous temperature rise because of lack of commitment of nations to cut emissions at source will translate to the roasting of Africa, an already very vulnerable continent.

“Food production capacity will also be diminished, exposing the continent to great danger,” he added. More

 

Life in Antarctica Relies on Shrinking Supply of Krill

On the Antarctic island of South Georgia, in February, toward the middle of what passes for summer at the bottom of the world, I hurried through the ruined whaling station of Grytviken.

I had an appointment at the British Antarctic Survey station on the opposite side of King Edward Cove. I was to interview a marine ecologist working on krill. I did not want to be late.

The keystone of the South Georgia ecosystem, the secret to the miraculous abundance of wildlife on this stark, cold, windswept island—the foundation, indeed, for almost all vertebrate life in the Antarctic—is krill.

South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are administered from the Falkland Islands as a British Overseas Territory, in which the little outpost of Grytviken is the only inhabited spot. The inhabitation is very marginal. In southern winter there are just eight staff members of the British Antarctic Survey, including a doctor, a government officer, and a postal clerk. A handful of visiting scientists augment this skeleton crew in southern summer.

Grytviken is gritty and grim. The name means "Pot Bay," a reference to the cauldrons in which the Norwegian whalers here rendered oil from blubber. It is apt. The rusting vats, boilers, ramps, chimneys, and ramshackle buildings of the long-abandoned whaling station; the wrecks of the catcher boats stranded on the waterfront; and the rows of giant whale-oil tanks upslope are all the apparatus of a genocide, in the literal, Latin sense of the word. The genus was Balaenoptera, the baleen whale.

From the whale's upper jaw, in place of teeth, hang long, fringed curtains of keratin—baleen—used to seine krill. The largest member of the genus and the biggest creature ever to live, the blue whale gets that way from its ability to process eight tons of krill a day.

The Antarctic, in its remoteness, girded by pack ice, abloom in summer with phytoplankton and coursing with torrents of krill, was the stronghold of the blue whale. The invention of the steam-powered catcher boat and the explosive harpoon ended all that. Today in the Southern Ocean, where a century ago 200,000 blue whales fed on the krill swarms of austral summer, only a few hundred are left. (Related: "Catching Copepods: Charasmatic Microfauna of the Arctic")

A Game of Chinese Boxes

If William Blake thought he had seen "dark satanic mills" in England, then he should have taken a stroll through Grytviken. After the darkness of the whaling station, and the black, snow-seamed rock of the encircling mountains, and the somber sky, the white interior of the British Antarctic Survey laboratory was dazzling.

For a moment I lost my bearings. Bright fluorescent light glinted from microscopes. Martin Collins turned away on a swivel stool from his laboratory workbench and stood to greet me. In his immaculate white lab coat he was incandescent, an angelic figure of medium height, pale-skinned, with semi-curly hair of indeterminate color. This might have been the start of the Rapture, with Collins as my heavenly guide—until I chanced to glance down. Beneath his white lab coat the ecologist was wearing muddy trousers and gumboots streaked with penguin guano.

He mimed an apology for not shaking hands, holding up both of his own to show blue rubber gloves. Just now he had been rooting around in fish stomachs. Pulling over a bucket of offal, he groped about inside and extracted a half-digested mackerel icefish. "That's come out of a skate's stomach," he said.

"A little worse for wear," I suggested.

Collins agreed and he dug again in the offal, searching for a more intact specimen. His bucket of guts was bloody, but not in the normal, crimson sense, for icefish have no hemoglobin. Their plasma is full of antifreeze but no red cells, so their blood runs clear.

"This one's probably slightly better," he said, holding up a less eroded fish. "There's a fishery for these mackerel icefish. We've done a trawl survey for icefish all around South Georgia to estimate the stocks. Icefish are krill feeders—80 percent of their diet is normally krill—so their stomachs can tell us what's happening with krill. I've done something like 650 icefish in the last couple of weeks. It's been a slightly strange year for the krill around South Georgia."

"Strange," I said. "In what way?"

"You get odd years, and 2004 was one of those, when there's a little bit less krill. This year seems to be fairly extreme. There's very little krill and scarcely any icefish at all. We're seeing the gentoo penguins struggling a little bit this season, as well. Not enough krill. The gentoos don't seem to be giving the food to their chicks that they normally do."

From his workbench Collins retrieved a glass dish of krill. He had extracted this handful—eight or nine little shrimplike crustaceans—from the stomach of an icefish, which he had previously extracted from the stomach of a skate, and had counted, weighed, and measured each one.

In death the krill were bright red. They were big Euphausia superba, the king of krill, probably the most successful species on Earth by measure of sheer biomass: roughly twice the weight of humanity, thronging in "swarms" as dense as 10,000 individuals per cubic meter.

In Norwegian, kril means "small fry." The noun is almost always a collective plural in that language, as it is in English. And as it is in the grammar of Nature herself, where krill are collective like no other organism. The name has an onomatopoeic rightness; "krill" seems to boil, seethe, swarm.

Collins's game of Chinese boxes—his opening of stomachs to investigate the stomachs within—had ended with this dish of krill. No further dissection was necessary, for krill are translucent, and the green contents of the gastric mill and the hepatopancreas were visible through the exoskeleton. In the middle of krill mating season, the last meal—interrupted by a hungry icefish—for these krill had been phytoplankton. More