drought

Drought-resistant crops sought to tackle food crisis

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drought sorghum

A farmer tending his crop of drought-resistant sorghum in the Karamoja region of Uganda. Organisations are joining forces to develop drought-resistant crops for farmers in the global South, amid warnings of a global food crisis.

Speed read

  • Acute food insecurity almost doubled between 2016 and 2021 — report
  • Drought-resistant crops and ‘speed breeding’ could offer solutions
  • Support urged for small-scale farmers, among most at risk

Agricultural organisations are joining forces to develop drought-resistant crops for farmers in the global South, amid warnings of a global food crisis that threatens the world’s poorest.

G7 ministers meeting this week said the world was facing a worsening state of food insecurity and malnutrition as a result of the war in Ukraine, which has driven up food, energy and fertiliser prices with “devastating consequences for some of the most vulnerable people”.

The number of people facing food insecurity at “crisis levels or worse” almost doubled from 108 million in 2016 to 193 million in 2021, according to the Global Report on Food Crises 2022, released earlier this month.

“Conflict, climate extremes and the coronavirus pandemic were already conspiring to create an unprecedented hunger crisis in 2021. Now we have record-high food and fuel prices — driven even higher by the crisis in Ukraine — adding to the crisis.”

James Belgrave, a WFP spokesperson

Conflict, economic shocks and climate change were cited as leading contributors to acute hunger — a plight facing more than 320 million people this year unless urgent action is taken, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

In response to the report, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is launching a new initiative with partners including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to improve livestock and plant production, says Aladdin Hamwieh, breeder, biotechnologist and Egypt country manager for ICARDA. The strategy also aims to combat soil degradation, preserve fisheries, and strengthen agricultural guidance systems, he says.

“The initiative is based on developing plants that tolerate drought and salinity, such as wheat, barley and chickpeas, through cross-breeding and transfer of genetic traits between different plants to benefit from them,” explains Hamwieh.

The centre is also working on modern methods of plant breeding, such as speed breeding, to provide small-scale farmers with new varieties that can be cultivated in a short period, he adds.

The FAO has developed a Rapid Response Plan to support the most vulnerable smallholder and medium-sized farming households this year, according to Irina Utkina, a spokesperson for the organisation.

But Utkina says a significant increase in funding was needed to provide the emergency and resilience interventions. “Through the 2022 appeal, FAO requires $1.5 billion to assist 50 million people,” she tells SciDev,Net.

Trials of drought-tolerant beans in Colombia.

Improving smallholders’ climate resilience is essential, Rob Vos, director of markets, trade and institutions at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) tells SciDev.Net.

Immediate relief through humanitarian assistance and fiscal resources are needed to expand social protection programmes and support domestic food production, according to Vos. He says preventing further deterioration will require long-term solutions with investment in climate-resilient agriculture and rural livelihoods aligned with peacebuilding.

Ukraine

The number of people facing hunger is expected to increase this year as a result of several drivers, including the Russia-Ukraine war, according to the food crisis report released by the Food Security Information Network and the Global Network Against Food Crises.

The conflict in Ukraine is disrupting the global trade of food, fertilisers and petroleum products, driving up food and fuel prices around the world.

“Food prices have increased by 30 to 50 per cent in many markets and doubled in some markets, and the cost of bread has increased by 20 per cent in some countries,” says Sally Farid, assistant professor of economics at the Faculty of African Graduate Studies at Cairo University in Egypt.

James Belgrave, a WFP spokesperson, tells SciDev.Net: “Conflict, climate extremes and the coronavirus pandemic were already conspiring to create an unprecedented hunger crisis in 2021. Now we have record-high food and fuel prices — driven even higher by the crisis in Ukraine — adding to the crisis.”

Belgrave says that in 81 countries where the WFP operates, acute hunger is expected to rise by 47 million people if the conflict in Ukraine continues unabated, with the steepest rises in Sub-Saharan Africa. “This on top of the 276 million who already face acute hunger worldwide, meaning that up to 323 million people could face acute hunger in 2022,” he says.

Vos adds: “Not all major food crises countries are affected by the Ukrainian crisis in the same way. Countries like Yemen and Sudan are particularly affected as both are highly dependent on wheat imports for domestic food consumption.”

More than half a million people in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, South Sudan and Yemen were classified in the report as being in a “catastrophic” phase of acute food insecurity, requiring urgent action to save lives.

Almost 70 per cent of the total number of people facing acute hunger were in ten countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Pakistan, and Haiti.

Poor More Likely to Suffer During South Africa’s Dire Drought

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Cape Town, South Africa is in the throes of a years-long drought that could earn it a truly alarming distinction: the first major city in the developed world to run out of water.

South Africa as a whole is experiencing its worst drought in a century. The six dams that supply Cape Town’s water have dropped to just 15.2 percent capacity of usable water, according to the Los Angeles Times, down from 77 percent in September 2015. Enforcement of strict water restrictions – which cut permitted daily consumption from 23 gallons per day to just 13.2 gallons – begin February 1.

Shravya K. Reddy, principal at Pegasys Strategy and Development and Climate Reality’s former director of science and solutions, lives in Cape Town and says that while several factors – including relatively rapid population growth, poor planning, and people ignoring previous water restrictions – have all contributed to this crisis, officials’ failure to recognize the role that climate change plays in exacerbating drought has made the situation even more dire.

“Decision-makers well-versed with climate science would have taken it seriously and would have started treating this drought, even in 2015 or 2016, as if it would last longer than usual,” Reddy tells Climate Reality. “Instead, they seemed to never escalate the preparations for additional water supplies or accelerate water augmentation projects in the belief that taking drastic action would be overkill, since the rains would come. If they had taken more concerted action two years ago or early last year, then they would not need to be on such war footing right now.”

Climate change worsens drought because as temperatures rise, evaporation increases. When this evaporation happens over land, soils dry out. Many places are also experiencing both decreases in annual precipitation and longer periods without significant rain, resulting in reduced water levels in streams, rivers, lakes, and (importantly) reservoirs. When rains do come, much of the water runs off the hard ground and is carried back to the ocean before it can fully replenish dams, reservoirs, or the water table.

All of Cape Town’s citizens are feeling the impact of the drought, but the city’s lower-income residents are already bearing the brunt. Should the city, which has a population of more than 4 million people in its greater metropolitan area, run out of water on April 21, as many are predicting, their plight will become truly desperate.

“Socio-economic disparity is evident in both peoples’ access to critical information, as well as in the measures people are taking to prepare for ‘Day Zero,’ the day when the city has to shut off municipal water and taps literally run dry,” Reddy says. “In speaking with people who typically have to work the longest hours just to financially survive, it seems to me that they simply don’t have access to the same levels of information we do, and thus are less empowered to make informed decisions about how they will cope and manage.”

This disparity, she adds, can often be traced back to a lack of computer and internet access among many of South Africa’s lower-income communities.

Another imbalance has become clear: Wealthier citizens have the resources to prepare and safeguard themselves from the worst of the water crisis’ impacts.

“Those with more disposable income can stock up on more bottled water. We can also invest in more water-saving devices,” Reddy explains. “Many of Cape Town’s most under-resourced residents live in what we call townships or informal settlements – what the West would call shanty towns or even slums – and they’re lucky if they have a communal water source amongst eight to 10 families. They certainly cannot buy and hoard bottled water.

“People with means – transportation as well as leisure time – can drive farther out of the city to areas where clean, potable water comes out of natural springs and can collect water to take home. Those who don’t have the luxury of a car and time to drive around are less able to take advantage of such natural springs hours away.”

She notes that some retailers are even taking advantage of the situation, increasing the price of common water conservation tools like buckets, pitchers, and other water storage units because of higher market demand, making them even less accessible to the people who may need them the most.

And beyond the obvious necessity of clean drinking water, Reddy worries that “significant public health challenges will emerge as a result of people not being able to maintain individual and institutional hygiene.” The risk of water-borne diseases and other bacterial infections may also rise sharply, elevating the risk of serious public health issues.


“Money buys other adaptation means too. The wealthy have greater ability to buy more new clothes as a response to less clothes washing, ordering takeout food as a response to less cooking and dishwashing, buying ‘chemical toilets,’ tons of wet-wipes, hand sanitizer, and leaving the city for long stretches of time to escape elsewhere – either by renting places in other cities or staying with friends and family who can afford to accommodate long-term guests,” she continues.

“Based on what several people in my circles have been saying, it is clear that some people will have the ability to temporarily leave the city and move to their second homes out in the countryside, to parts of the province that are not as water stressed. Some may even temporarily move to Johannesburg or leave the country until some semblance of normalcy is restored. The majority of the city’s residents do not have that immense privilege.”

Reddy concludes on a note that has become all too familiar for many already experiencing the climate crisis firsthand: “Certainly in the case of climate change adaptation in any community, anywhere in the world – those with greater means at their disposal will fare better.”

With each new natural disaster, the truth becomes clearer: The most vulnerable among us are on the front lines of a crisis they had the least to do with creating – and if we don’t act now to support solutions and end climate change, we may reach a point of no return.

Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought

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Nestlé is draining California aquifers, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. Nestlé then sells the people’s water back to them at great profit under many dozen brand names.

The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation continues to bottle city water to sell back to the public at a big profit, local activists charge.

The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought.

The coalition, the crunchnestle alliance, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory.

A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.

The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down.

“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,” according to the coalition.

“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,” the coalition said.

Activists say that Sacramento officials have refused attempts to obtain details of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members have addressed the Sacramento City Council and requested that Nestle’ either pay a commercial rate under a two tier level, or pay a tax on their profit.

Warming Drought

In October, the coalition released a “White Paper” highlighting predatory water profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water Bottling Company in various cities, counties, states and countries. Most of those great “deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Additionally, the environmental impact on many of those areas yielded disastrous results.

Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said, “This corporate welfare giveaway is an outrage and warrants a major investigation. For more than five months we have requested data on Nestlé water use. City Hall has not complied with our request, or given any indication that it will. Sacramentans deserve to know how their money is being spent and what they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re getting ripped off.”

For more information about the crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn (530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) gmail.com or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251

Nestlé is currently the leading supplier of the world’s bottled water, including such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino, and has been criticized by activists for human rights violations throughout the world. For example, Food and Water Watch and other organizations blasted Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment” in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”

 “The failure to examine Nestlé’s track record on the human right to water is not surprising given recent statements by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging the human right to water,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She noted that the company famously declared at the 2000 World Water Forum in the Netherlands that water should be defined as a need—not as a human right.

“In November 2013, Colombian trade unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated by a paramilitary organization while many of his fellow workers were in the midst of a hunger strike protesting the corporation’s refusal to hear their grievances,” according to the groups.

The press conference and protest will take place just days after Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the LA Times on March 12 that California has only one year of water supply left in its reservoirs.

“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agribusiness, Southern California water agencies, and oil companies conducting fracking operations. The $67 billion plan won’t create one single drop of new water, but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm land out of production under the guise of “habitat restoration” in order to irrigate drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate mega-growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

The tunnel plan will also hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels will be good for agribusiness, water privateers, oil companies and the 1 percent, but will be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and environment of California and the public trust.

The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!

In fact, the endangered Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the entire Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct, according to UC Davis fish biologist and author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital Public Radio.

“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council. 

According to Capital Public Radio:

“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.

‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. “Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’

Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California.

‘All these biological opinions on Delta smelt that have restricted some of the pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle.

But Moyle says pumping water from the Delta to Central and Southern California could still be restricted at certain times because of all the other threatened fish populations.”

The Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, reached a new record low population level in 2014, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall midwater trawl survey that was released in January.

Department staff found a total of only eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled each month from September through December

The smelt is considered an indicator species because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is endemic to the estuary and spends all of its life in the Delta.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) to index the fall abundance of pelagic (open water) fish, including Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and American shad, nearly annually since 1967. The index of each species is a number that indicates a relative population abundance.

Watch Nestle’s CEO declare water “food that should be privatized, and not a human right”:

Source:http://collectivelyconscious.net

 

NASA satellite to help farmers combat drought

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NASA scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new satellite than can predict the severity of droughts worldwide and help farmers maximise crop yield. Currently, there is no ground- or satellite-based global network monitoring soil moisture at a local level.  Farmers, scientists and resource managers can place sensors in the ground, but these only provide spot measurements and are rare across some critical agricultural areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

SMAP uses two microwave instruments to monitor the top 5 centimetres of soil; Image credit: NASA

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission, scheduled to launch later, will collect the kind of local data agricultural and water managers worldwide need. SMAP uses two microwave instruments to monitor the top 5 centimetres of soil on Earth’s surface.

Together, the instruments create soil moisture estimates with a resolution of about 9 kilometres mapping the entire globe every two or three days.  Although this resolution cannot show how soil moisture might vary within a single field, it will give the most detailed maps yet made. “Agricultural drought occurs when the demand for water for crop production exceeds available water supplies from precipitation, surface water and sustainable withdrawals from groundwater,” said Forrest Melton, a research scientist in the Ecological Forecasting Lab at NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California.

“Based on snowpack and precipitation data in California, by March we had a pretty good idea that by summer we’d be in a severe agricultural drought,” Melton added. “But irrigation in parts of India, the Middle East and other regions relies heavily on the pumping of groundwater during some or all of the year,” Melton said.

Underground water resources are hard to estimate, so farmers who rely on groundwater have fewer indicators of approaching shortfalls than those whose irrigation comes partially from rain or snowmelt. For these parts of the world where farmers have little data available to help them understand current conditions, SMAP’s measurements could fill a significant void. Some farmers handle drought by changing irrigation patterns. Others delay planting or harvesting to give plants their best shot at success.

Currently, schedule modifications are based mostly on growers’ observations and experience. SMAP’s data will provide an objective assessment of soil moisture to help with their management strategy. “If farmers of rain-fed crops know soil moisture, they  can schedule their planting to maximise crop yield,” said Narendra Das, a water and carbon cycle scientist on SMAP’s science team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,California.

“SMAP can assist in predicting how dramatic drought will be, and then its data can help farmers plan their recovery from drought,” said Das.

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Rice gene digs deep to triple yields in drought.

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A gene that gives rice plants deeper roots can triple yields during droughts, according to Japanese researchers writing in Nature Geneticsthis week (4 August).

Rice is a staple food for nearly half of the world’s population, but is also particularly susceptible to drought owing to its shallow roots, researchers say.

“If rice adapts to or avoids drought conditions using deeper roots, it can get water and nutrients from the deep soil layers.”

Yusaku Uga

The new study shows that by pointing roots down instead of sideways, the Deeper Rooting 1(DRO1) gene results in roots that are nearly twice as deep as those of standard rice varieties.

“If rice adapts to or avoids drought conditions using deeper roots, it can get water and nutrients from the deep soil layers,” says the study’s lead author Yusaku Uga, a researcher with Japan’s National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences.

Uga and his team found that in moderate drought conditions, the yield of rice with DRO1 was double that of the shallow-rooted rice variety. Under severe drought conditions, this increased to 3.6 times greater.

“The most important point is that we had rice grains produced under drought conditions,” says Uga. “When rice crops just tolerate drought, they cannot get water and nutrients, resulting in a kind of survival mode.”

The DRO1 gene occurs naturally in more than 60 rice varieties. For the study, the research team crossbred a rice variety carrying DRO1 with a shallow-rooted variety and then bred the offspring together to produce a rice crop in which DRO1 was uniformly present.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) estimates that an additional 8-10 million tonnes of rice will be needed each year to keep rice prices affordable at around US$300 per tonne. Finding a drought-resistant variety of rice may be key to attaining this goal, according to researchers.

“Drought is the most widespread and damaging of all environmentalstresses,” says Sophie Clayton, head of communications at IRRI. “In some states in India, severe drought can cause as much as 40 per cent yield loss [in rice crops]. Moreover, with the onset of climate change, droughts may become more frequent and more severe.”

Source: Scivx

Climate Change and severe drought in Arizona.

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http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?pageType=scitech&url=http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57564795/severe-droughts-in-amazon-linked-to-climate-change-says-study/&catid=57564795