Posts Tagged ‘malnutrion’
Activists Slam G8 Aid Shell Game in Toronto
“No maple leaf is big enough to hide the shame of Canada’s summit of broken promises” — Oxfam
Canada spent $1.2 billion hosting G8/G20 Summits
By Stephen Leahy
BERLIN, Jun 26, 2010 (IPS)
The G8 bloc of wealthy nations promised five billion dollars Saturday for health and nutrition programmes that benefit women and children in developing countries.
The five-year Muskoka initiative announced at the annual G8 meeting, this year outside of Toronto, is intended to help prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women and babies who currently die during childbirth each year. Nearly eight million children, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, die before they reach the age of five.
Flavia Bustreo, director of the Geneva-based Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, which represents more than 300 global and national organisations, welcomed the world’s richest countries’ focus on maternal and child health, which is a historical first, she said.
However, she told IPS from Geneva, “The glass is half-full when it comes to their financial commitment.”
Oxfam and other NGOs also charge that G8 donor nations have been playing a shell game – making multi-billion-dollar commitments at such meetings but without increasing their overall spending on overseas development aid.
“No maple leaf is big enough to hide the shame of Canada’s summit of broken promises,” said Mark Fried, spokesperson for Oxfam. Read the rest of this entry »
Food Supply In Deep Trouble – Agriculture Most Vulnerable to Climate Change
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 2 (IPS)
Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more starving people will be part of humanity’s grim future without concerted action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported this week.
The current devastating drought in East Africa, where millions of people are on the brink of starvation, is a window on our future, suggests a new study looking at the impacts of climate change.
“Twenty-five million more children will be malnourished in 2050 due to effects of climate change,” such as decreased crop yields, crop failures and higher food prices, concluded the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) study.
“Of all human economic activities, agriculture is by far the most vulnerable to climate change,” warned the report’s author, Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist with IFPRI, a Washington-based group focused on global hunger and poverty issues.
The report, “Quantifying the Costs of Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change“, may be the “most comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on agriculture to date”, as IFPRI claims, but researchers concede that there is no current way to quantify all of the future repercussions of changing weather patterns on the food supply.
A critical component of agriculture is knowing the best time to plant seeds, for example. Farmers rely on their past experience and weather records. But one of the most robust science findings is that climate change has and will produce significant increases in weather variability.
This means extremes like droughts or floods will happen more often or last longer, and extreme temperature shifts are more likely. The past is no longer a reliable guide for farmers because the fundamental conditions in the atmosphere have been altered – far more heat is being trapped in the atmosphere today because of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than at any time since the dawn of agriculture.
Nelson told IPS that the IFPRI report is a “conservative estimate” of the potential impacts and does not include impacts of pests and disease, loss of farmland due to rising sea levels or loss of water from melting glaciers. Read the rest of this entry »
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