I would say that since the Second World War, we haven't seen a humanitarian situation as severe as the current one. Dr. Martin Frick, director of the World Food Program
For the first time in over fifty years, a United States President has announced a conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. It is in response to the food crisis of 2022 and likely famine in 2023.
This is a dangerous time for humanity. Covid, conflict, climate change, and rising fertilizer and fuel costs have brought us to this point in a civilization that requires courage, outrage, and a political will that does not exist. The climate isn’t front-page news heck, Joe says it’s way too depressing to cover on their show, and Mika agrees. The hunger crisis is mentioned here and there, but everyone mainly ignores it.
We are currently at only the beginning of the climate crisis at a 1.2-Celsius temperature rise, which will spawn a starvation crisis for hundreds of millions of people. One can only imagine what happens at 1.5, 2.0, and higher. It is not just the droughts, floods, wildfire, heatwaves, locusts, hail, and locusts that devastate crops. Vlad the Bloody isn’t helping at all. The Middle East and Africa are paying the highest price, for now anyway.
Still, in combination with the war in Ukraine and the loss of biodiversity, food-dependent nations are struggling to feed themselves. A few of the world’s breadbaskets will not be exporting food as climate impacts damage their agriculture and, fertilizer is in short supply.
There is a ring of fire stretching around the world where conflict and climate shocks compounded by COVID-19 and rising costs are driving millions of people to the brink of starvation – threatening to increase migration and instability globally this year, David Beasley, United Nations World Food Programme.
Two hundred eighty-three million people have been on the edge of starvation, reports the world's largest humanitarian organization in the past two years.
“We have a ring of fire circling the earth now from the Sahel to South Sudan to Yemen, to Afghanistan, all the way around to Haiti and Central America,” Beasley said at a session of the Munich Security Conference in Germany. “If we do not address the situation immediately over the next 9 months we will see famine, we will see destabilization of nations and we will see mass migration. If we don’t do something we are going to pay a mighty big price.”
A total of 45 million people in 43 countries are teetering on the edge of famine with overall global needs for humanitarian assistance on a clear upward trend and are now higher than ever. Every region in the world is faced with the prospect of millions waking each day to empty plates, soaring food prices, economic downturn, ruined crops, and violent conflict knocking on their door.
As global hunger rates and humanitarian needs shoot ever higher, the resources required to meet them are levelling off. Just this month, a funding crunch has forced WFP to reduce the size of the food rations received by eight million people in Yemen. In the next few weeks there is a risk of further cuts. These come at the worst possible time as Yemenis deal with the consequences of a serious escalation in fighting and continued economic deterioration.
“We averted famine and catastrophe in 2021 and 2022 because nations stepped up. We thought COVID would be behind us by 2022, but it only recycled again, exacerbating, and creating economic catastrophes among the poorest countries around the world,” Beasley said. “WFP has the solutions and we’ve got the programmes to stop this crisis, we just need the money, otherwise nations around the world will pay for it a thousand-fold.”
In the last two years, the number of food insecure people has jumped from 135 million to 283 million. This could spike further. In this unprecedented year, WFP’s assistance that is a lifeline for families in emergencies has to grow together with an increased stress on changing lives through building resilience so that more poor people on the brink of hunger are not pushed over the edge. Such work stabilizes communities in particularly precarious places and helps them better to survive sudden shocks without losing all their assets.
America’s far-right has been more tuned to the global food crisis than you would think. Recently, new conspiracies are in full swing on Twitter over the food crisis. Besides the blame they place on Joe Biden, they have some whacky theories on the food crisis.
Primitive on Twitter writes:
They are blocking the sun which is an attempt to stop crops growing as well as cutting out natural vitamin d priduction, by harvest time, again, it will rain heavily and crops will rot, they are engineering a food crisis, they are poisoning the air we breathe...
The deep state is blocking the sun from starving Americans and is also deliberately blowing up our food warehouses and grain silos, according to the lunatics on the right. According to the Qanon folks, the reason is to create a food crisis.
MR WHITE writes on Twitter:
Food processing plants don’t just “accidentally” burn down at this rate and they certainly don’t “coincidentally” become landing pads for plane crashes at the rate they are. Our food supply is under attack in America. The question is—by who?
MR. WHITE, grain silos do catch fire. “Ignition sources are quite common and readily available in grain handling industries. Static electricity, welding and maintenance activities, smoking, lightening, a light switch or friction on belts or bearings within the grain elevator are just some of the sources that can create a spark that can lead to an explosion.”
In response to MR WHITE, Henry writes:
Could these places that have been attacked or damaged be poisoning our food? This is a question that has been eating at me since this all began.
Fox News, of course, is spreading the manure like fertilizer to an agricultural field with their deluded TV watchers.
But enough of these assholes. Let’s visit Putin and his bloody genocidal war in Ukraine.
Russia is being accused of seeking to engineer “famine” in Ukraine by the country’s human rights chief amid evidence of the targeting of agricultural facilities and the large-scale theft of grain and farming equipment.
At least two grain storage facilities and a state-of-the-art laboratory have been destroyed in Russian attacks as part of what both Ukrainian and Western figures say appears increasingly to be a Kremlin strategy to cripple food production in Ukraine and profit from the scarcity of key foodstuffs.
The United Nations revealed this weekend that some 4.5 million tonnes of grain is blockaded from export via Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. Russian troops have been in turn accused of looting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain as well as the theft of nearly 30 agricultural vehicles, including combine harvesters, from a tractor dealership.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s ombudswoman for human rights, said the tactics amounted to a premeditated attempt by Vladimir Putin and his generals to interrupt and damage food production as a tactic of war.
Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter and the inevitable impact of the Russian invasion on yields has already raised fears of a crisis for low-income countries reliant on its wheat exports after prices rose by 40 per cent since 24 February .
In a Facebook posting, Ms Denisova said Moscow, which has repeatedly claimed it is not targeting civilians in Ukraine, had breached the Geneva Convention by targeting food production. She said: “Russian occupation forces are deliberately taking measures to cause a famine in Ukraine.”
Ms Denisova set out a series of claimed destructive actions taken by Russia and used the term “Holodomor” – a reference to Ukraine’s Great Famine in 1932-33 which killed up to 10 million people and many insist was a deliberate policy of genocide by starvation engineered by the Soviets.
Roberto Silvestro and Sergio Rossi, write in The Conversation about how the warming world is creating a mismatch between plants and pollinators.
The timing of phenological events are calibrated to ensure the perfect environmental condition needed to accomplish the annual cycles of a plant's life while minimizing the risk of damage. Changes in these conditions can have ecological as well as economic consequences as they can affect the quantity and quality of agriculture and forestry products.
At the end of the growing season, plants develop dormant buds to protect the sensitive meristematic cell layer—tissue in which cells maintain the ability to divide throughout the life of the plant—and suspend activity. Dormancy is an adaptation mechanism evolved in climates with seasons to escape harsh winter conditions.
Warm spring temperatures (called forcing), the increase in day length during spring (photoperiod), and the length and intensity of winter temperatures (chilling) reactivate the growth of the apical buds—the buds located at the top of the plant—in the spring. Clearly, temperature has a central and leading role in this process. For this reason, warming can trigger an earlier reactivation in spring and a delayed cessation in autumn, or both, lengthening the growing season.
Some believe that a longer growing season could enhance carbon uptake and, therefore, the productivity of forests. In some places, such as regions in the northern latitudes or elevated altitudes, trees have profited from a longer growing season and, more generally, more favourable climatic conditions under global warming.
However, an earlier growth reactivation increases the risk of damage due to late spring frosts, and lengthening of the growing season increases the risk of damage by early autumn frosts.
There are so many other factors to consider in this crisis.
China Faces Worst Crop Conditions Ever Due to Climate Change
Turkey: Quarantine is being implemented in 26 provinces due to potato wart disease
Heatwave scorches India's wheat crop, snags export plans
Europe loses their stone fruits and other crops over freezing temperatures
Bird flu is driving up the price of more than eggs and poultry
And so many more as climate shocks are happening everywhere.
It’s right there above you. Just lookup.