Famine

see obesity back for 12/15 recovery

hunger is older and mostly US

caused by poverty and inequality war, AGW

see climate chaos global weirding

see palestine gaza sudan RDF

11/17 see famine for int'l large scale

nb serious population art'ls 7/18

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The 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie "Soylent Green "— which starred Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson and took place in 2022 — depicted a hellish world in which widespread pollution and global warming had led to severe food and water shortages as well as widespread hunger and desperation. Now, in 2025, a newly released study finds that severe weather is threatening crops in a major way — and that the production of some key crops in the United States could decrease by as much as 50 percent by the end of the 21st Century.

The study was published by Nature.com on Wednesday, June 19 and was, according to CNN's Laura Paddison, "eight years in the making." It was conducted by a group of scientists, including Solomon Hsiang of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and illustrates the link between food supply and climate change.

"Of the many impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis," Paddison reports in an article published by CNN that day, "damage to the global food system is one of the most terrifying. But the overall impact of climate change on crops — and how much it can be offset by farmers' adaptations — has been hard to establish and hotly debated…. The scientists analyzed six crops — maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries.Together, these crops provide more than two thirds of humanity's calories."

The CNN reporter continues, "They also measured how real-world farmers are adapting to climate change, from changing crop varieties to adjusting irrigation, to calculate the overall impact of global warming. Their findings are stark."

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Paddison notes that according to the study, "every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day." Hsiang warns that this will increase food prices.

Hsiang told CNN, "If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast…. This is a major problem. It's incredibly expensive. As a species, we have never confronted anything like this."

Paddison reports, "Wheat, soy and maize — high value crops for a lot of the world — will be especially badly affected, the study found. If humans keep burning large amounts of fossil fuels, maize production could fall by 40 percent in the grain belt of the U.S., eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; wheat production could fall by 40 percent in the U.S., China, Russia and Canada; and soybean yields could fall 50 percent in the U.S."

The CNN journalist adds, "The only staple crop that might be able to avoid substantial losses is rice, which can benefit from warmer nighttime temperatures…. Global warming will be particularly devastating for the U.S., where it's projected to reduce yields by 40 percent to 50 percent for all staple crops except rice, Hsiang said."

*Read the study at Nature.com and find CNN's coverage here.

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More than a million people in some of the world's most impoverished countries could be fed for three months and hundreds of thousands of children's lives could be saved if $98 million in ready-made meals and other rations were able to leave four warehouses run by the U.S. foreign aid agency dismantled by the Trump administration.

But instead, there is no end in sight to the food languishing in the facilities—or to the starvation of millions of people in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and other parts of the Global South facing high levels of hunger and malnutrition.

Some of the 66,000 tonnes of food, including grains, high-energy biscuits, and vegetable oil, are slated to expire as soon as July, when they will likely be turned into animal feed, incinerated, or otherwise destroyed, Reuters reported Thursday.

The warehouses are located in Houston, South Africa, Djibouti, and Dubai, and are run by the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Many of the staff who help run the warehouses are scheduled to be fired on July 1 in the first of two rounds of cuts that will effect nearly all of USAID.

Contracts with suppliers, shipping companies, and contractors have been canceled since USAID was taken over by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with the White House saying the agency—with a relatively small budget of just $40 billion—was responsible for "significant waste."

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Since DOGE, run by tech billionaire Elon Musk, targeted USAID in one of its first full-scale attacks on a federal entity, the agency is being run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance has not yet approved a proposal to give the stranded food stocks to aid organizations for distribution, two former USAID staffers told Reuters.

That office is being led by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former DOGE employee who is overseeing the complete decommissioning of USAID, which has provided humanitarian assistance in conflict zones and the Global South for more than six decades.

Max Hoffman, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said the massive waste of life-saving food rations was the result of President Donald Trump and Musk deploying "some idiot 20 year old staggering around USAID turning things off without the faintest idea of the consequences."

Some of the rations were intended for Gaza, where half a million Palestinians are currently facing starvation and the rest of the population of 2.3 million people are suffering from acute levels of food insecurity due to Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid which was reimposed in March after a brief cease-fire. Thousands of children have been hospitalized with acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year, but Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza has left health providers with extremely limited means to treat them.

The entire population of Gaza could be fed for a month and a half with the food rations that are on the verge of rotting in the four warehouses, Reuters reported.

Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits in Dubai are among the stocks that will expire in July, a former USAID official told the outlet. They could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month.

The food aid was also scheduled to go to Sudan, where famine has been confirmed in at least 10 areas as the country faces the third year of a civil war.

Action Against Hunger is one of many aid groups that have had to scale back operations after losing significant funding due to U.S. cuts; the group said last month that its suspension of work in the Democratic Republic of Congo had already directly led to the deaths of at least six children.

In addition to USAID's warehouses full of soon-to-be-expired food, the U.S.-based company Edesia, which makes the peanut-based Plumpy'Nut, told Reuters that USAID's cuts to transportation contracts had forced the company to open an additional warehouse. A $13 million stockpile of 5,000 tonnes of Plumpy'Nut, which is used to prevent severe malnutrition in children, is in the warehouse now—but could be used to feed more than 484,000 children.

"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said Oxfam America.

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musk restart peanut butter after PR fail but

says cuts usaid 83 % done 18% trans to state

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After enduring days of harsh headlines and relentless ridicule, **U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio** took to his personal social media account at 4:55 AM on Monday to announce the official, sweeping cancellation of the vast majority of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts—igniting a firestorm of outrage and backlash.

Claiming a “6 week review” had been conducted, Secretary Rubio announced, “we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.”

“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio alleged, not defining what those core interests are. “In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department. Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein noted Secretary Rubio’s announcement “was news to state officials who were told LAST WEEK they’d have until this Wednesday to submit forms for the review process.”

Last week had already been a bad week for Secretary Rubio. A high-profile cabinet meeting fight with Elon Musk dominated headlines for days, leading to a Saturday Night Live skit mocking him and Elon Musk. Rubio is also being hammered with his own eloquent 2016 speech, for switching support from Ukraine to Russia. And he is being mocked for ignoring his own speech on why Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal.

The bad news did not stop there.

After his pre-dawn tweet, CNN’s KFile published a report on Rubio’s acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, “one of Trump’s most senior State Department appointees,” that exposed “deleted tweets spreading unfounded rumors that Rubio attended gay foam parties and calling him ‘low IQ.'”

Meanwhile, backlash is growing from Rubio’s announcement that USAID is being dismantled.

“Huge mistake,” declared Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, now a Stanford University professor. “We needed reform of USAID not dismantlement. China is not ending is foreign assistance programs. In an age of great power competition, the Trump administration is unilaterally destroying one of our best instruments of soft power influence.”

Dr. Norman Ornstein, a highly regarded political scientist, wrote: “I cannot believe that you were once viewed as a hero in the development and diplomacy community. Little Marco is not accurate enough for your cowardice and cruelty. Selling your soul and the lives of thousands or millions to bow down to Trump and have a Cabinet post. Disgraceful.”

Let month, Ambassador McFaul had written, “In 2012, when I was the US ambassador to Russia, Putin shut down USAID inside Russia. Why? Because their work supported free markets, democracy, human rights —ie causes that threatened Putins dictatorship. Shutting down USAID is exactly what autocrats all over the world want.”

An Army veteran of 22 years who served four combat tours, Fred Wellman is a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School. He is now a political consultant and the host of the podcast “On Democracy.”

“You are disgusting. 6 weeks. Millions will suffer because you’re a coward. China will step in because you want Trump to give you power. What a small pathetic man,” Wellman charged.

But he did not stop there.

He pointed to a ProPublica report from last week titled, “Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency.”

“One million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition,” the report reads, “up to 166,000 people will die from malaria and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade, the memos estimated. The programs were cut anyway.”

“This is your legacy, Little Marco,” Wellman angrily declared. “Hundreds of thousands of deaths.” And in strong language Wellman attacked Rubio for apparent hypocrisy over his habit of posting biblical passages to social media, while accusing him of being a “fascist.”

Journalist Kevin Baron, the founding executive editor of Defense One, wrote: “In just 6 weeks they determined the worthiness of every USAID program? Ridiculous claim. When we investigated 4-years of USAID spending from 2001-2004, we had 55,000 rows of expenditures to sift through, from AIDS drugs to embassy curtains.”

Joey Politano, who writes about economics at Apricitas, offered some stark facts.

“Impossible for cuts this deep to not have incredibly devastating effects on global well-being—in 2024, ~28% of 2024 USAID spending was emergency response distribution of food & medicine alone, another ~15% was HIV/AIDS prevention work, and another ~6% was TB/Malaria/Ebola control,” Politano said.

“USAID’s programming is so massive and so diverse that it’s almost impossible to understand the immense ramifications of these cuts,” observed former CIA political analyst Michael Shurkin. “But little if any negative effects are or will be visible to most Americans, who will shrug their shoulders and say, ‘good job!'”

National security and civil liberties journalist Marcy Wheeler accused Secretary Rubio of “defunding support for Christian minorities overseas.”

Tim Hirschel-Burns, a policy liaison for the Global Economic Governance Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center noted: “The most important thing here is how many people are suffering unnecessarily, but remember this is also an insanely clear violation of the separation of powers. If the executive can get rid of 83% of something Congress appropriated, Congress doesn’t control the budget anymore.”

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After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February.

Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to continue operating.

The administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online: field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.

In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Peter Marocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue, granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a “targeted, case-by-case review” of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID. That review, they said, would take three months.

Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The U.S. has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they’ve already completed.

Rubio and Marocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they’ve described to the courts, according to internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and USAID, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s evisceration of the American foreign aid system.

Current and former officials say that Marocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts. “None of us believe that they’re conducting a careful, individualized review,” one official said.

In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Marocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cellphone service, at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID’s Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency.

For more than 24 hours, OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at the OIG, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials. “This is an urgent issue for us, as we have OIG staff in warzones with no ability to receive security alerts,” a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company.

Eventually USAID reversed the termination.

Current and former officials throughout USAID and the State Department said the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday’s termination notices undermine Marocco’s claims of a deliberative process.

“It’s a pretext,” one USAID official told ProPublica. “The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project, and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake.”

If that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say, the administration will have defied a federal judge’s order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling USAID.

The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Marocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, “We need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security, and operations of USAID staff,” according to a court filing.

Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump’s blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump’s agenda.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump’s executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it didn’t comply, the judge issued another order, giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over unpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices.

More than 90% of USAID’s global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including programs to address maternal deaths and gender-based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world.

In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its programs supporting refugees in war-torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated.

Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die, CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told ProPublica.

In the meantime, they have been forced to close other lifesaving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited Alight clinics every day for weight check-ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and a mobile unit served around 1,200 patients a day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed, Wyatt said.

Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that house people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn’t received any payments since Trump took office.

“We believed when Rubio said that there was no intention of cutting emergency lifesaving services that would basically cause immediate death,” said Wyatt. “We trusted that those would be protected.”

One of the State Department’s highest-ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge’s order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. “She was in tears about it,” the attendee said. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Rubio available for an interview. Marocco also did not respond to questions.

By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID’s former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building; many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well.

“This is more than lost jobs. We’re losing the sector,” a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15-minute time window to pick up her belongings. “The U.S. government is losing its influence. We’re now more unsafe as a country.”

In the early hours of Feb. 13 at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Blumont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the U.S. government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn’t received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its U.S.-funded work except a daily bread delivery.

The armed theft was the result of the U.S. not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica.

Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Blumont’s invoices and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It is one of the few programs still online and receiving money.

Prior to Jan. 20, the U.S. spent about $60 billion on nonmilitary humanitarian and developmental aid each year — far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress.

Since Trump took office, Marocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they have also stopped paying bills for work that has already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration’s dismantling of USAID, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led federal district court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by Feb. 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Marocco gave the court. Almost none of it has been paid, the court filings show.

U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts, legal experts told ProPublica.

Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn’t reimbursed them that they remained inoperative. Medicines that were already purchased by U.S. taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them, several contractors told ProPublica.

On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court’s order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total.

In Marocco’s own testimony to the court on Feb. 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose “specific awards” to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequences of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio.

But USAID staff say that subject-area experts and key personnel who are responsible for the programs were not involved in many terminations, while most others had already lost their jobs.

In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.)

The one-page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Marocco had “determined your award is not aligned with Agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest.” The notice added: “Immediately cease all activities.”

The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract’s basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review.

David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Marocco’s claims in court about careful reviews. “It suggests the process was done very hastily,” he said.

On the ground, in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats.

“What really bothers me is that we’re just looking at numbers, we’re not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations,” said Dr. Anja Giphart, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania.

Pulling treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, Giphart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don’t have the opportunity to step in. Half of children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track again,” she said.

In Uganda, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, which is funded by USAID, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks — including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the U.S. government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its lifesaving work.

So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice hours later. The foundation’s executive director, Dr. Dithan Kiragga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all U.S.-funded operations and hope that the Uganda health ministry can step in.

“The patients will be told that we are closing,” Kiragga said. “They’ve relied on our systems and support for quite a few years. We saved lives.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

Maryam Jameel and Ashley Clarke contributed reporting.

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The "most-deprived" areas across the planet are in facing a land crisis, BBC reports, according to the World Food Programme.

Due to droughts and flooding, the organization's global office director Martin Frick told BBC, that because "the land can no longer sustain crops" in some places, there are "zero" harvests left as a result.

Furthermore, Frick warns that "that without efforts to reverse land degradation globally, richer countries would also begin to suffer crop failures" as well.

Frick noted that "as a father of three, he was 'not a fan of doomsday scenarios', but admitted that 'what we are seeing is most worrying,'" BBC reports.

The World Food Program director, however, offered a glimpse of hope by arguing that it's still possible for countries to move "toward localised farming that seeks to reinvigorate the land."

Still, BBC reports, "Meanwhile, flash floods in Afghanistan earlier this year are estimated to have destroyed 24,000 hectares of land already considered highly degraded. Environmentalists expect that as soil degrades, failing crops will strain global food supplies and increase migration from affected areas."

Frick emphasized, "There's too much carbon in the air and too little carbon in the soils. With every inch of soil that you're growing, you're removing enormous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. So healthy soils – carbon-rich soils – are a prerequisite to fixing climate change."

Save Soil chief science officer Praveen Sridhar told the news outlet, "It's going to be disaster for human beings. It’s going to be like Mad Max."

Shrihar added, "There will be no humanity. There will be no charity. There will be no fairness... The only thing that lets you be will be survival."

*BBC's full report is available at this link.

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international delegates left Germany Friday following the Bonn Climate Change Conference, climate campaigners called the talks, which lasted 10 days this month, an "utter failure" for neglecting to establish plans to support the Global South in adapting to the planetary crisis—months after developing countries demanded aid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland.

"It is unconscionable that developed countries continue to kick the issue of financing for loss and damage down the road—first COP26, now Bonn," saidJeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, referring to the impacts of the climate crisis which developing nations have already suffered and demanding that the issue get badly-needed attention at upcoming talks.

"Such financing would enable countries to deal with the impacts on their people’s lives and livelihoods, homes and health systems, and must be a core component of the COP27 agenda," Miller added.

deepening campaigners' anger was the fact that European countries present at the Bonn conference are currently boosting fossil fuel imports to replace the gas shipments they previously received from Russia, which were largely discontinued after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine earlier this year.

"The E.U. completely misses the point of what it is to be a climate leader," said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. "European countries also urgently need to massively ramp up their climate and energy targets, rather than displace oil and gas from Russia with those from developing countries, further locking them into fossil fuels. That's what climate leaders should do."

Focusing on sourcing new fossil fuels from overseas while "consistently" blocking discussions about loss and damage financing in Bonn "exposed [the E.U.'s] hypocritical stance," saidHarjeet Singh, the group's senior climate impacts advisor.

Patricia Espinosa, the outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), claimed the talks in Bonn took steps "in several technical areas" including a "global stocktake" mechanism, which will allow officials to assess international progress toward the target of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That view,said Aurore Mathieu, international policy coordinator for Climate Action Network France, highlights "the huge disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inability to progress on concrete outcomes to respond to it."

"Climate impacts are worsening throughout the world, hitting the most marginalized communities, and rich countries are still refusing to acknowledge their climate debt by providing finance for loss and damage," said Mathieu.

Wealthy countries, added Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International, are "sleepwalking us all into catastrophe," noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the world only has three years at most to reach peak carbon emissions before they must begin reducing them.

"The disconnect between the accelerating climate crisisoutside the conference halls and the lack of concrete action inside is palpable," saidShaw. "Developed countries refuse to even discuss long owed and vital loss and damage finance. Instead of taking action, rich countries are trying to shift responsibility for action to developing countries, while expanding their own plans to extract fossil fuels and chasing unproven technofixes."

"We know the solution is a rapid and equitable phase out of fossil fuels and a shift to people-centered renewables," she added.

The climate talks took place as Delhi, India faced a severe heatwavein which meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 107°F and above for 25 days since the summer began.

Indian delegates were among those who demanded in Bonn that wealthy countries help provide "massive funding so the government can prepare for extreme weather events by building early warning systems."

The climate emergency has also pushed Madagascar toward the planet's first climate-fueled famine and is expected by 2050 to internally displace 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, and 17 million in Latin America.

"One out of five people in Africa are suffering from hunger, and this is just one of countless ways the climate crisis is spurring devastation that is ripping through our communities," said Hellen Neima, Africa climate director for Corporate Accountability International. "We have had enough of rich, polluting countries silencing those trying to fight for justice."

"We have had enough of you offering crumbs with one hand while you starve the world with the other," Neima added. "We have had enough of our lives being valued as less worthy than Big Polluters' profits... Your empty words cannot fill our stomachs or protect our homelands. People in Africa are rising up and will continue to rise up, until the justice that is owed is delivered at COP27."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/new-global-report-warns-nearly-40-of-plants-are-at-risk-of-extinction

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New global report warns nearly 40% of plants are at risk of extinction

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams October 01, 2020

Humanity's destruction of nature has made an estimated two in five plant species worldwide at risk of extinction, according to an assessment published Wednesday by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom.

The fourth annual report, entitled State of the World's Plants and Fungi (pdf), draws on the expertise of 210 researchers from 42 countries for what professor Alexandre Antonelli, director of science at RBG Kew, calls an "unparalleled collaborative effort" that aims to put the planet and all its inhabitants on a more sustainable path.

"Open your fridge, peek into your medicine cupboard, examine your living room, feel your clothes. For thousands of years, we have searched nature to satisfy our hunger, cure our diseases, build our houses, and make our lives more comfortable," Antonelli writes in the report's introduction.

"But our early exploration of useful traits in species relied on rudimentary tools, and Indigenous knowledge was lost as local traditions were downplayed and globalization emerged," he adds. "As a result, humanity is still a long way from utilizing the full potential of biodiversity, in particular plants and fungi, which play critical roles in ecosystems. Now, more than ever before, we need to explore the solutions they could provide to the global challenges we face."

The report comes on the heels of a United Nations assessment that the international community has failed to fulfill any of the biodiversity targets that were set a decade ago as well as the latest edition of World Wide Fund for Nature's flagship publication, which warned that "nature—our life-support system—is declining at a staggering rate." Specifically, WWF found "an average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish between 1970 and 2016."

Throughout the report's 12 chapters, researchers address the importance of seeking out species before they disappear and calculating extinction risk; ways that plants and fungi can be used in terms of food, energy, healthcare, and more; how biological resources can be used more wisely; and the conditions in the U.K. and its territories.

"Natural ecosystems provide useful services for humanity, such as regulating climate, preventing floods, and filtering water. As the building blocks of ecosystems, plants and fungi have the potential to help us address current environmental challenges, such as climate change," the report notes. "However, these natural benefits could be compromised by biodiversity loss, caused by humans clearing or degrading natural vegetation and over-harvesting wild species, as well as by shifting weather patterns."

Given the importance of plants and fungi, "we need to have a rough idea of the conservation status of every species," Eimear Nic Lughadha, conservation scientist at RBG Kew and lead author of the extinction chapter, explained in a statement. Lughadha highlighted advancements with artificial intelligence, adding, "the techniques are good enough to say, 'this area has a lot of species that haven't been assessed but are almost certainly threatened.'"

In 2019 alone, 1,942 plants and 1,886 fungi were scientifically named for the first time, according to the report—which adds that "current threats to global biodiversity, from climate change, logging, and land-use change, make the task of cataloguing species a race against time."

Only six species of medicinal fungi have been assessed for conservation status, "one of which, Fomitopsis officinalis, a wood-inhabiting parasitic fungus, has already been pushed to the brink of extinction," the report says. Out of 25,791 known medicinal plants, 5,411 have been assessed and 723—or 13%—are threatened.

Professor Monique Simmonds, deputy director of science at RBG Kew and lead author of the commercialization chapter, told the Guardian that humanity should look to nature for treating coronaviruses and other diseases with pandemic potential. As she put it: "I am absolutely sure going forward that some of the leads for the next generation of drugs in this area will come from plants and fungi."

The report also notes that even though there are at least 7,039 plants that hold potential as foods, "just 15 crop plants contribute to 90% of humanity's energy intake, and more than four billion people rely on just rice, maize, and wheat." As an RBG Kew statement explained, "Relying on a handful of crops to feed the global population has contributed to malnutrition and left us vulnerable to climate change."

Stefano Padulosi, co-author of the food chapter, said that "the thousands of underutilized and neglected plant species are the lifeline to millions of people on Earth tormented by unprecedented climate change, pervasive food and nutrition insecurity, and economic disempowerment."

"Harnessing this basket of untapped resources for making food and production systems more diverse and resilient to change should be our moral duty to current and future generations," declared Padulosi, former senior scientist at the Alliance of Biodiversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

Antonelli agreed, saying broadly that "the data emerging from this year's report paint a picture of a world that has turned its back on the potential of plants and fungi to address fundamental global issues such as food security and climate change. Societies have been too dependent on too few species for too long."

"At a time of rapid biodiversity loss, we are failing to access the treasure chest of incredible diversity on offer and missing a huge opportunity for our generation," he added. "As we start the most critical decade our planet has ever faced, we hope this report will give the public, businesses, and policymakers the facts they need to demand nature-based solutions that can address the triple threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food security."

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locust Swarms, Some 3 Times the Size of New York City, Are Eating Their Way Across Two Continents

:{:{BY: BOB BERWYN}:

Climate change is worsening the largest plague of the crop-killing insects in 50 years, threatening famine in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Read More}:

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Climate Change Threatens the World’s Fisheries, Food Billions of People Rely On

BY GEORGINA GUSTIN

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/severe-climate-related-droughts-could-threaten-60-of-global-wheat-crop-by-2100/

...Underscoring the necessity of aggressive action to combat human-caused global warming, research published Wednesday warns that the majority of the world’s wheat fields are at risk of enduring “severe, prolonged, and near-simultaneous droughts” by the end of the century—raising serious concerns about future food insecurity and political instability.

“Even under the ambitious mitigation scenario aimed to stabilize global warming at 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels, the increase in the frequency and extent of adverse weather extremes and related shocks on the production side would be unprecedented.”

—study

“If only one country or region sees a drought there is less impact,” said study co-author Song Feng of the University of Arkansas. “But if multiple regions are affected simultaneously, it can affect global production and food prices, and lead to food insecurity.”

The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Science Advances, was conducted by team of researchers from the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Wheat accounts for about 20 percent of all calories consumed by humans worldwide and the global demand for wheat products such as cereal is expected to rise in the coming decades, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Recognizing humanity’s reliance on the crop as a key food source, the study’s researchers analyzed various climate models to assess the rising risk of drought in wheat-producing regions.

...

ff 75% ghg land use 25% DN

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/03/ipcc-land-use-food-production-key-to-climate-crisis-leaked-report

guk no lnx

We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report

Cutting carbon from transport and energy ‘not enough’ IPCC finds

Robin McKie

Sun 4 Aug 2019 04.00 EDT First published on Sat 3 Aug 2019 08.00 EDT

Hereford beef cattle. The IPCC report says meat consumption should be cut to reduce methane emissions.

Hereford beef cattle. The IPCC report says meat consumption should be cut to reduce methane emissions. Photograph: Australian Scenics/Getty Images

Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists will warn this week.

A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world produces food and manages land.

Humans now exploit 72% of the planet’s ice-free surface to feed, clothe and support Earth’s growing population, the report warns. At the same time, agriculture, forestry and other land use produces almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, about half of all emissions of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, come from cattle and rice fields, while deforestation and the removal of peat lands cause further significant levels of carbon emissions. The impact of intensive agriculture – which has helped the world’s population soar from 1.9 billion a century ago to 7.7 billion – has also increased soil erosion and reduced amounts of organic material in the ground.

In future these problems are likely to get worse. “Climate change exacerbates land degradation through increases in rainfall intensity, flooding, drought frequency and severity, heat stress, wind, sea-level rise and wave action,” the report states.

It is a bleak analysis of the dangers ahead and comes when rising greenhouse gas emissions have made news after triggering a range of severe meteorological events. These include news that:

• Arctic sea-ice coverage reached near record lows for July;

• The heatwaves that hit Europe last month were between 1.5C and 3C higher because of climate change;

• Global temperatures for July were 1.2C above pre-industrial levels for the month.

This last figure is particularly alarming, as the IPCC has warned that rises greater than 1.5C risk triggering climatic destabilisation while those higher than 2C make such events even more likely. “We are now getting very close to some dangerous tipping points in the behaviour of the climate – but as this latest leaked report of the IPCC’s work reveals, it is going to be very difficult to achieve the cuts we need to make to prevent that happening,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The new IPCC report emphasises that land will have to be managed more sustainably so that it releases much less carbon than at present. Peat lands will need to be restored by halting drainage schemes; meat consumption will have to be cut to reduce methane production; while food waste will have to be reduced.

Among the measures put forward by the report is the proposal of a major shift towards vegetarian and vegan diets. “The consumption of healthy and sustainable diets, such as those based on coarse grains, pulses and vegetables, and nuts and seeds … presents major opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

There also needs to be a big change in how land is used, it adds. Policies need to include “improved access to markets, empowering women farmers, expanding access to agricultural services and strengthening land tenure security”, it states. “Early warning systems for weather, crop yields, and seasonal climate events are also critical.”

The chances of politicians and scientists achieving these goals are uncertain, however. Nations are scheduled to meet in late 2020, probably in the UK, at a key conference where delegates will plant how to achieve effective zero-carbon emission policies over the next few decades.

The US, the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will have just had its presidential elections. A new Democrat incumbent would likely be sympathetic to moves to control global heating. Re-election of Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax”, would put a very different, far gloomier perspective on hopes of achieving a consensus.

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icn 719

Ravaged by Drought, a Honduran Village Faces a Choice: Pray for Rain or Migrate

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08072019/climate-change-migration-honduras-drought-crop-failure-farming-deforestation-guatemala-trump

Climate change is affecting crop yields and reducing global food supplies

Deepak Ray, University of Minnesota

As climate change alters temperature and rainfall patterns, yields of some crops are increasing while others decline. The net result: less food, especially where it's most needed.

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https://www.alternet.org/world/theres-growing-international-alliance-right-wing-demagogues

no lnx few

There’s a Growing International Alliance of Right-Wing Demagogues

From Brazil’s Bolsonaro to the Philippines’ Duterte to the leader of them all, Trump.

By Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2018, 12:06 PM GMT

Lula in His Cell

Lula da Silva—Brazil’s former president—is sitting in his prison in Curitiba, a small town southwest of São Paulo. He should not be there. Evidence of corruption against him hangs on the words of a felon. Lula should have been on the ballot. But the oligarchy refused to allow this most popular man to run for the presidency. Lula is visited by Pastor Anete Roese of the Evangelical Lutheran Confessional Church of Brazil. The pastor steps outside the prison and makes a statement. She says that Lula is concerned about the escalation of violence in Brazil. People are being murdered when they express their political support for the Workers’ Party candidate for president—Fernando Haddad. “The gates of violence are opening,” said Pastor Roese. The election—on October 28—will signal an “unprecedented avalanche of violence,” warned the pastor. Lula, sitting in his cell, unjustly incarcerated, worried with her. It is the poor who will suffer. It is always the poor who suffer.

Bolsonaro’s Fraud

Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate of the far-right who is now the candidate of the oligarchy, leads in the polls. He is nostalgic for Brazil’s military dictatorship(1964-1985) and wants to use unconstitutional force against those whom he sees are a problem for Brazil. His targets are the poor and the social minorities—Afro-Brazilians, Gays, Leftists. The oligarchy flooded the Bolsonaro camp with money. Democracy needs lubrication, and money does the trick. Some corporations used their money to create WhatsApp groups that carried fraudulent messages about Haddad, who is running against Bolsonaro. This is illegal. The hashtag #Caixa2doBolsonaro zipped across the internet. The whiff of fraud should have triggered an immediate investigation. It did not happen. It is Lula in prison. Bolsonaro hides his fangs behind his smile.

Bannon’s Fascist International

Steve Bannon said as he left the White House that the shackles were off his hands. He was no longer imprisoned by propriety. He wanted to be in the trenches, building his white supremacist, fascist international. Bannon calls his group The Movement. One of Bolsonaro’s sons said that Bannon has advised his father’s campaign, that Bannon—in sum—has drawn Bolsonaro into The Movement. Bolsonaro hastily denied this claim. To be linked to Bannon is not an advantage. Nor to Bannon’s fascist international directly. Nothing Bolsonaro says is varnished. He called people from the African continent, from Haiti and from the Arab-speaking world the “scum of humanity.” Bolsonaro’s moral geography mirrors that of Donald Trump, who called many of these places “shithole countries.” Of Afro-Brazilians, Bolsonaro called them lazy and obese, saying, “I don’t think they’re even good for procreation anymore.” Another member of the fascist international—Marine Le Pen of France—said that Bolsonaro’s comments are “extremely unpleasant.” Bolsonaro distressed her. This is Bannon country. Precise and clearly articulated hatred and venom.

Gunmen

Bolsonaro has been proud to say that he is “Brazil’s Trump.” But this is not a good comparison. It is clearer to say that Bolsonaro is Brazil’s Duterte.Rodrigo Duterte is the president of the Philippines. He came to office with a gun in his hand.Duterte was the mayor of Davao, where he empowered death squads to kill anyone deemed to be a criminal. “Kill them all,” he said in 2015 in reference to criminals. “Kill a drug dealer and I’ll give you a medal,” he said. He likes to be photographed with a gun in his hand, preferably a machine gun. Duterte would like to give out 42,000 guns to deepen the civil war in his society. Violence is the antidote to social problems. No policy of economic and social reform is sufficient. Gunfire is Duterte’s solvent. It is the glue of the Bolsonaro family. Jair Bolsonaro’s son—Eduardo—won re-election to the Federal Assembly on October 7 with a massive margin. In a video from last year, Eduardo holds a 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle and says of the school shootings in the United States, “Thanks to you who support gun-free zones and this initiative to disarm people—you are responsible for these massacres.” Duterte also likes high-caliber sniper rifles, the M-4 Armalite being a favorite. These are men with guns, men who believe that guns make good policy.

Money and Monsters

In August, Steve Bannon told New York magazine that the rise of Trump—and the other neo-fascists (or monsters)—can be directly linked to the financial crisis of 2008. “The legacy of the financial crisis is Donald J. Trump,” Bannon said. “You know why the deplorables are angry? They’re rational human beings. We took away the risk for the wealthy.” Wall Street dislikes this analysis. They would like to maintain a firewall between their shenanigans and the rise of what they like to call “populists.” Bannon is both right and wrong. He is right that the neoliberal “moderates” drove a policy from the 1980s onward that allowed the rich to avoid paying taxes and to avoid investment, while the working people failed to earn their share from the gains of productivity and technology. High inequality rates around the world drained the legitimacy of the neoliberal “moderates.”

The neo-fascists that emerged with acid on their lips did speak clearly about the fraud of the system, the theft from ordinary people by the oligarchy. But they did not point their fingers at the oligarchy or at high finance. Instead, true to form, the neo-fascists pointed their guns at migrants and refugees, at the urban poor and the rural distressed. For them, social marginality is the crime. Under cover of the monsters’ corrosive rhetoric, the oligarchy and the bankers have continued their plunder. None of these neo-fascists wants to implement Basel-III, a framework to regulate banking by increasing capital holdings. Nor do they want to make sure that corporations bear the downside of risks, rather than take the profits and burden taxpayers with losses. None of these elementary reforms are on the lips of the neo-fascists. They are too busy oiling their guns.

Hunger and Illiteracy

Hunger hangs heavily over the Brazilian poor. In 1960, the Afro-Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary, “What a surprising effect food has on our organisms. Before I ate, I saw the sky, the trees, the birds—all as yellow. But after I ate, everything became normal to my eyes.” Hunger is blistering. It is what Lula’s government focused upon with its Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program. According to the UN, hunger was almost eradicated by Lula’s government. Haddad was Lula’s education minister. They used public funds to expand Brazil’s public university system. Food and reading were at the heart of the Workers’ Party agenda. Poverty was reduced by 55 percent, while extreme poverty was reduced by 65 percent. No guns were needed. Lula’s agenda was to expand democracy. Bolsonaro’s agenda is to deepen neo-fascism.

No Neutrality

Five hundred people of good sense—from Bernie Sanders to Angela Davis, from Noam Chomsky to Pablo Iglesias—signed a short document, an international declaration against fascism in Brazil. The document calls upon the Brazilian population to reject Bolsonaro, whose presidency would be a “threat to any free, tolerant and just society.” Brazilians will have to choose between “liberty and pluralism” on one side and “retrograde authoritarianism” on the other. “There can be no neutrality,” the signatories write, “in the choice between democracy and fascism.” This is a document. It might have a small impact. But it will not be able to compete with fake news and with hatred. Hatred is a more powerful emotion than love. It is what so easily undermines democracy. If Bolsonaro wins, asks the Portuguese political theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, will Brazil still be a democracy?

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Climate Change a 'Key Driver' Behind Rising Global Hunger

The number of hungry people in the world has reverted to levels last seen a decade ago, the United Nations warned Tuesday in its annual report on food security and nutrition.

Nearly 821 million global citizens—or one out of every nine people—were undernourished in 2017, the third consecutive rise since 2015. Hunger affected 804 million people in 2016 and 784 million people in 2015.

Keep reading...

China’s Breadbasket Could Suffer the Worst of Climate Change’s Deadly Heat Waves

Deadly heat waves are breaking records and making headlines around the world this summer, but they have nothing on the heat waves that the North China Plain is likely to see in the future if we don't act now to combat climate change....

https://www.alternet.org/new-study-refutes-trumps-climate-change-denial-and-highlights-threat-corn-crops-around-world

To hear President Trump and his former EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, tell it, climate change is a fantasy. But many scientists and researchers disagree—and according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate change could lead to corn crop failures around the world.

Michelle Tigchelaar, a researcher at the University of Washington and lead author of the study, discussed her findings with NPR’s “Living on Earth” after it was published. According to Tigchelaar, “Increased warming leads to global crop failures because plants are not adapted to really high temperatures. Most of our crops are really well-adapted for our current climate. There is an optimum temperature at which they grow, and beyond that, their yields decline.”

The study noted that a climatic warming of only two degrees Celsius could cause corn yields to decline by 20-40% in the world’s main growing regions, while a warming of 4 degrees Celsius could result indeclines of 40-60%. Corn is the most traded crop in the world, and it is an important staple of the diet in Mexico(where it is used to make tortillas) as well in Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But feeding people isn’t the only use of corn crops, which are also used for everything from sugar to biofuel to feeding livestock.

Tigchelaar pointed out that the majority of the world’s corn crops are grown in a handful of countries, including the U.S., Argentina, China and Brazil—and simultaneous crop failures in those countries could have devastating effects.

Farmers, according to Tigchelaar, might be able to adapt to climate change in the future—although it won’t be easy.

“Already, we see that wheat is expanding northward,” Tigchelaar explained to NPR. “So, we might be able to soon grow corn in places we couldn’t grow it before. Similarly, farmers might decide to shift their planting dates to avoid the hottest time of the year.”

Among environmentalists, the Trump administration has been criticized extensively for denying the existence of climate change and promoting fossil fuels over green energy. Scott Pruitt, who recently left his position as administrator for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is a climate change denier—and the U.S.’ European allies were disappointed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was a big departure from the Obama administration’s environmental policies.

Merkel has stressed that Germany, unlike the U.S., has no intention of leaving the Paris Agreement.German Chancellor Angela Merkel described Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement as “very regrettable,” declaring, “We know climate change isn’t a matter of faith—it’s a fact.”

“The German government,” according to Merkel, “stands fully behind the Paris climate accord because ambitious climate policies don’t just help limit the worst consequences of climate change—they also offer chances for innovation and therefore, growth and prosperity worldwide.”

Tigchelaar, during the NPR interview, noted that those most affected by global corn crop failures “would be poor, urban consumers worldwide, mainly in developing nations. That is really unfortunate because those people generally tend to be most vulnerable to climate change to begin with.”

https://www.alternet.org/climate-change-will-make-rice-less-nutritious-putting-millions-worlds-poor-risk

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/25/headlines/climate_change_war_fuels_rising_hunger_worldwide

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