Beautiful! The Girl Effect. Thanks to Anothercompany.

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Some remembrances from two weeks fieldwork in the Southwest of England: Exeter, Devon.

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What’s behind the world food crisis? Yes, the growing world population is a huge contributor to the need for more food. Yes, reckless food- and oil-seed-based biofuel subsidies have added to the problem. Yes, the climate crisis will contribute enormously. Yes, greater prosperity by previously vegetarian consumers in India and China will increase demand for feed grains.

But the media only occasionally touch on why we are having this particular food crisis: market fundamentalism and the privatization of world food security. Sunday’s New York Times has a devastating article on the dismantling over the past 20 years of the network of publicly funded and accountable agricultural research centers.

Read more  at the Huffington Post…

Photo (cc) by Stephan Geyer.

Another striking article at Alertnet focuses on a barely mentioned part of the food crisis: global water scarcity. Read it here…

Photo by Enviro Warrior.

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Why are oil prices soaring so high, and will they ever return to Earth? Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris, explains why peak oil is real, why biofuels are indispensable, and how China determines what you pay at the pump.

Read more at Foreign Policy…

Photo ©2008 by Anothercompany

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The refugee challenge in the 21st century is changing rapidly. People are forced to flee their homes for increasingly complicated and interlinked reasons. Some 40 million people worldwide are already uprooted by violence and persecution, and it is likely that the future will see more people on the run as a growing number of push factors compound one another to create conditions for further forced displacement.

Today people do not just flee persecution and war but also injustice, exclusion, environmental pressures, competition for scarce resources and all the miserable human consequences of dysfunctional states

Read more at the UNHCR website…

Another article, from 17th June’s The Guardian, explains the complext relationship between conflicts fuelled by climate change and the amount of refugees worldwide. Antonio Guterres, UN Commissioner for the refugees, explains. Read more at The Guardian…

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