The US is sinking into depression, and as the result of globalization much of the rest of the world is being dragged along. Most people have never seen anything like this in their lifetimes. What they are witnessing is secular upheaval that will bring great change to beliefs, values and lifestyles. A new word is needed to describe it, as it is something much more than an economic depression. Maybe reconstruction will serve as the descriptive term for now. [...more]
Low-income neighborhoods that lack easy access to grocery stores could lead to a breakdown of food security for hundreds of thousands of people - not in the developing world, but in major urban areas of the U.S. That's the conclusion from a report to be published in the inaugural issue of the International Journal Behavioural and Healthcare Research produced by Inderscience Publishers. [...more]
Food prices have soared over the past year. One might think that this would provide a welcome boost to the incomes of the world’s poorest people, most of whom are farmers and farm workers. But it doesn’t work that way, as Raj Patel explains [...more]
Food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries throughout the world, while Americans are wasting "an astounding amount of food -- an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption." It works out to about a pound of food wasted every day for every American. It doesn't have to be this way. [...more]
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place? [...more]
Nationwide, uninsured children in families earning between $38,000 and $77,000 a year are just as likely to go without any health care as uninsured children in poorer families. More than 40 percent of children in those income brackets who are uninsured all year see no physicians and have no prescriptions all year, according to new research from the University of Rochester Medical Center. [...more]
It's really an absurd travesty when starvation gets blamed on "global warming do-gooders," and we haven't seen the last of that. The problem is miscast, though. There isn't a food shortage, at least not yet. There is a food price crisis, which is a very different beast. [...more]
A new UNICEF UK report launched today - exactly ten years after the UK signed the Kyoto Protocol (on 29 April 1998) - reveals that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children are being hit the hardest by the impact of climate change. The report, ‘Our climate, our children, our responsibility: the implications of climate change for the world’s children’ draws attention to the fact that climate change is impacting very seriously on children and their rights. [...more]
Psychologists at the University of Liverpool say that ‘Madonna-style’ inter-country adoptions are causing a rise in the number of children in orphanages.
Researchers found that EU countries with the highest rates of children living in institutions also had high proportions of international adoptions. This did not reduce the number of children in institutional care but attributed to an increase. The study highlights that in countries such as France and Spain, people are choosing to adopt healthy, white children from abroad rather than children in their own country who are mainly from ethnic minorities. [...more]
Urban food deserts – areas where people have low or no access to food shops – exist in major cities, according to research published in the open access publication International Journal of Health Geographics, with important implications for public health policies. In an exploration of food deserts in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, Kristian Larsen and Jason Gilliland of The University of Western Ontario Geography Department mapped and compared supermarket locations in the city in 1961 and 2005 and assess the changing levels of residents’ access. [...more]
