Agriculture

Image: Cattle roam dirt-brown fields on the outskirts of Delano, in California’s Central Valley. Scientists predict future droughts will be far worse than the one in California. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

theguardian.com - February 12 2015 - Suzanne Goldenberg

The US south-west and the Great Plains will face decade-long droughts far worse than any experienced over the last 1,000 years because of climate change, researchers said on Thursday.

The coming drought age – caused by higher temperatures under climate change – will make it nearly impossible to carry on with current life-as-normal conditions across a vast swathe of the country.

COMMENTARY:  HUFFINGTON POST  by Kanayo F. Nwanze President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)                                                                                                                                 Jan. 26, 2015

....Now we must begin to look at what happens to the affected communities after Ebola. A food crisis seems increasingly likely to follow in the wake of the epidemic, which has devastated small-scale farmers. Without investment in their long-term development, farming households - and West Africa's future food security - will remain at risk.

Even before the outbreak, the World Food Programme estimated that some 1.7 million people in the region faced food insecurity - defined as a lack of reliable access to sufficient quantities of affordable, nutritious food. As a direct result of Ebola, it is expected that an additional 750,000 to 1.4 million people will become food-insecure by March.

In fact, Ebola has already affected the food supply. Farmers have stayed away from their fields due to illness, fears of infection and quarantines ordered by the authorities - or simply because there is no one left to tend the land....

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION (FAO)                                                            Dec. 17, 2014

The number of people facing food insecurity due to the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone could top one million by March 2015 unless access to food is drastically improved and measures are put in place to safeguard crop and livestock production, two UN agencies warned today.

The disease's impact is potentially devastating in the three countries already coping with chronic food insecurity, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said in three country reports published today.

Border closures, quarantines, hunting bans and other restrictions are seriously hindering people's access to food, threatening their livelihoods, disrupting food markets and processing chains, and exacerbating shortages stemming from crop losses in areas with the highest Ebola infection rates, the FAO-WFP reports stressed.

Read complete report.
http://www.fao.org/emergencies/fao-in-action/stories/stories-detail/en/c/273018/

Image: North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom. Farmers are coping with the environmental and financial costs of wastewater spills from the drilling.Dermot Tatlow / LAIF / Redux

america.aljazeera.com - September 6th, 2014 - Laura Gottesdiener

Last summer, in a wet, remote section of farm country in Bottineau County, landowner Mike Artz and his two neighbors discovered that a ruptured pipeline was spewing contaminated wastewater into his crop fields.

“We saw all this oil on the low area, and all this salt water spread out beyond it,” said his neighbor Larry Peterson, who works as a farmer and an oil-shale contractor. “The water ran out into the wetland.”

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)