Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 854 million people around the world remain undernourished. Foreign aid for agriculture and rural development has declined from over US$9 billion per year in the early 1980s to less than US$5 billion in the late 1990s. At present, forty countries face food emergencies, with the worst situation in the Darfur region of the Sudan. According to a recent FAO report, "the already precarious food supply situation [in Darfur] may worsen if deteriorating security disrupts the main harvest due to start in the coming few weeks."

The FAO report, Crop Prospects and Food Situation, for October 2006 warns that prospects for the year's cereal harvest have deteriorated further due, amongst other things, to adverse weather conditions in Australia, Argentina, Brazil and South Asia. "The main concern is the declining stocks and whether supplies will be adequate to meet demand without world prices surging to even higher levels," the report states. The southern Africa region will require 542,000 tons of cereal for the 2006/7 season to meet predicted shortfalls. HIV/Aids, high unemployment and low purchasing power are cited as the main reasons for the continuing crisis in this region.

October 9th was World Overshoot Day for 2006, the day on which humanity exhausted this year's renewable natural resources and began living beyond its ecological means, according to Global Footprint Network (GFN). Mathis Wackernagel, GFN executive director, warns that "humanity is living off its ecological credit card and can only do this by liquidating the planet’s natural resources. While this can be done for a short while, overshoot ultimately leads to the depletion of resources, such as the forests, oceans and agricultural land upon which our economy depends."

Humanity first went into ecological debt in 1987, when Overshoot Day was December 19th. By 1995, it had moved forward to November 21st. "By living so far beyond our environmental means, and running up ecological debts we make two mistakes. First, we deny millions globally who already lack access to sufficient land, food and clean water the chance to meet their needs. Secondly, we put the planet’s life support mechanisms in peril," said Andrew Simms, policy director of the new economics foundation, a GFN partner.

Millions could become homeless in the Asia-Pacific region as sea levels rise by up to 50cm by the year 2070, warns a new report from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. "Vast areas of the Asia-Pacific are low lying, particularly the small-island states, as well as the large river deltas found in India and Bangladesh, Southeast Asia and China," note the authors. As sea-level rise tops 50cm, "large areas of Bangladesh, India, Vietnam are inundated and Kiribati, Fiji and the Maldives are reduced to just a small fraction of their current land area."

World Vision Australia head, Tim Costello, called for a review of national immigration policy, saying that "this is enlightened self-interest, because there are going to be so many environmental refugees knocking on our door, flooding here with the sea levels rise as predicted and... the failure of economics and crops because of the rain changes in so many of these countries." The study was commissioned by the Climate Change and Development Roundtable and was conducted by Ben Preston, Ramasamy Suppiah, Ian Macadam and Janice Bathols.