'Unseen' News and Views
New York/Geneva, 19 April 2021 (WMO)* – Extreme weather combined with COVID-19 in a double blow for millions of people in 2020.
However, the pandemic-related economic slowdown failed to put a brake on climate change drivers and accelerating impacts, according to a new report compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and an extensive network of partners.
– Since the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was launched in 2006, yields have barely risen, while rural poverty remains endemic, and would have increased more if not for out-migration.
Timothy A. Wise
AGRA was started, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020.
There are no signs of significant productivity and income boosts from promoted commercial seeds and agrochemicals in AGRA’s 13 focus countries. Meanwhile, the number of undernourished in these nations increased by 30%!
When will we ever learn?
What went wrong? The continuing Indian farmer protests, despite the COVID-19 resurgence, highlight the problematic legacy of its Green Revolution (GR) in frustrating progress to sustainable food security.
President Biden announced a removal of all U.S. troops by September 11, but he failed to include some important details.
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An Afghan taxi-driver in Vancouver told one of us a decade ago that this day would come:
Giving a voice to soil organisms – our silent allies in the fight against hunger. FAO-hosted Global Symposium on Soil Biodiversity kicks off
Closeup of worm culture. Worms are used to improve soil quality.ROME, 20 April 2021 (FAO)* –– The Global Symposium on Soil Biodiversity hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on 19 April 2021 kicked off with a call to preserve this vast community of living soil organisms and the vital ecosystem services they provide.
(UN News)* — Although they represent the greater part of the world’s cultural diversity and speak the major share of its languages, indigenous people are three times more likely to live in extreme poverty, the UN chief told the opening session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Monday [19 April 2021].
Rome/Lima (FAO)* – Latin America and the Caribbean “are truly a pillar for world food security,” QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), on 16 April 2021 said in an address to more than 30 ministers from the region and North America.
Addressing the Third Hemispheric Meeting of Ministers and Secretaries of Agriculture of the Americas, the Director-General hailed the region’s contribution to preventing the COVID-19 health crisis from becoming a food crisis. “Now you need to be the architects of recovery, a recovery with transformation,” he urged.
In this video Sam Olukoya interviews a young woman who was trafficked from her home in Nigeria after recruiters promised her a better life in Europe. Instead she was abandoned in Libya and sexually assaulted and abused.
– Sandra* had a baby born of rape. The young Nigeria woman had plans of a better life in Europe, but when her ‘recruiters’ abandoned her in Libya she was sexually assaulted and abused.
But after being deported back to Nigeria Sandra and her young son face daily discrimination and abuse about the boy’s parentage, even from her own mother and friends.
In the 1980s hysteria stopped being treated as a medical disorder. Since then, it has become the business model of the neoliberal age
15 April 2021 (FAO)* — In 1826, the genial French gastronome Brillat-Savarin penned the phrase “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
A microbiome is the genome of all the microorganisms living in and on all vertebrates. Though a new science, it is already helping us better understand the relationship between food and non-communicable diseases. ©Kateryna Kon/shutterstock.com
Two hundred years later, pathbreaking research suggests that what we eat doesn’t just give us fuel and pleasure but also feeds the trillions of microbes in our gut microbiome, and thus constitutes one of the most consequential interactive exposures we have to our environments.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 