'Unseen' News and Views
– Can African farmers feed the world?. Apparently the answer is “yes.” Bold as it may sound, this statement is based on specific facts: Africa is home to 60-65 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and 10 per cent of renewable freshwater resources, and it has registered a 160 per cent increase in agricultural output over the past 30 years.
Jondal, Hardangerakademiet, Norway, 1 August 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The Hardanger Academy is focused on the three UN concerns, peace-development-environment.
Johan Galtung
This year’s symposium was brilliantly opened by Vandana Shiva, a gift to the world from India.
She encompassed all three themes with deep insights; holistic and very dialectic in her approach, with forces and counter-forces in all her proposed solutions; with her optimistic activism and engagement.
The media missed a golden opportunity to tell the Norwegian public.
She was imported for a week from India, and met with dedicated counterparts and groups in Norway. They are not very visible in public space either; but the Hardanger Academy will try to change that.
What is in public space in Norway? A mirror image of US public space. If the US media say that Russian hacking was behind the enormous WikiLeaks revelations from the Democratic National Committee computer, so do the Norwegian media.
Land degradation – Sustainable land management: do nothing and you will be poorer. Credit: UNEP
“Every second, one person is displaced by disaster,” the Oslo-based Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reports. “In 2015 only, more than 19.2 million people fled disasters in 113 countries. “Disasters displace three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide.”
Global temperatures for the first six months of this year reached new highs, setting 2016 on track to be the hottest-ever on record, the United Nations weather agency on 21 July 2016 said.
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“Another month, another record. And another. And another. Decades-long trends of climate change are reaching new climaxes, fuelled by the strong 2015/2016 El Niño,” said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press release.
At Za’atari camp in Jordan, a third-generation confectioner from Dara’a makes popular sweets by hand.
(UNHCR)* Hunched over a stove outside his shelter in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp, Abu Rabee’ stirs a large pot of thick, sugary syrup with a wooden paddle. It is an exhausting process that takes more than an hour, but he insists the end result is worth the effort.
Abu Rabee’ cuts “raha” into small pieces at his caravan at Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan.
© UNHCR/Annie Sakkab
The 45-year-old Syrian refugee is making “raha”, Syria’s answer to Turkish delight, the most prized version of which originates from his home city of Dara’a, in the country’s south.
For Abu Rabee’, the endless stirring is a labour of love. Before the crisis, his factory in Dara’a used to produce 5,000 packs of raha a day, and the well-known brand was eagerly consumed throughout Syria and beyond.
11 July 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – A recent report from the National Academy of Science of The United States, titled Gene Drives on the Horizon : Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research with Public Values”, warns:
“One possible goal of release of a gene-drive modified organism is to cause the extinction of the target species or a drastic reduction in its abundance.”
Gene Drives have been called “mutagenic chain reactions”, and are to the biological world what chain reactions are to the nuclear world. The Guardian describes Gene Drives as the “gene bomb”.
Kevin Esvelt of MIT exclaims “a release anywhere is likely to be a release everywhere”, and asks “Do you really have the right to run an experiment where if you screw up, it affects the whole world?”
The NAS report cites the case of wiping out amaranth as an example of “potential benefit”. Yet, the “magical technology” of Gene Drives remains a Ghost, or the Department of Defence of the United States Government’s secret “weapon” to continue its War on Amaranthus Culturis.
With just six weeks left before the start of the main cropping season in Ethiopia, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on 29 April 2016 called for urgent funding to help farmers sow their fields and prevent drought-hit areas of the country from falling deeper into hunger and food insecurity.
For most vulnerable households in Ethiopia, the meher season is the best chance of growing food to bring them through the year. Photo: FAO/Tamiru Legesse
If seeds are not delivered in time, help will be too late to secure a decent harvest from the imminent meher season, which produces 85 per cent of the nation’s food supply, the UN agency said in a press release.
Helen Clark former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Administrator of the UN Development Program is one of four female candidates to be the next UN Secretary-General. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe.
The selection of the ninth secretary-general of the United Nations has been seen as a chance for change within the 70 year old global organisation. Some see 2016 as the time for the first woman to be chosen to lead the global organisation which represents over 7 billion people.
Añelo, a Patagonian town in southwest Argentina that experienced explosive growth because it is next to the country’s biggest shale oil and gas field, is now starting to feel the impact on the development of these resources due to the plunge in international oil prices. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS
GENEVA, 16 March 2016 (UNHCR)* – The UN Refugee Agency said today that more than one million people, mostly refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have now crossed into Greece since the start of 2015.
UNHCR called the milestone an urgent reminder of the need for a more coordinated approach to managing the influx and protecting people who are fleeing war and persecution.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 