There are many reasons why people not directly affected by food insecurity should consider it a problem, even taking moral considerations about social justice out of the equation.

The most eye-catching is that in creating desperate people, hunger becomes a source of conflict and a threat to everyone’s security.

“One of the arguments is terrorism and national security. When you have people living in poverty and hunger, that’s a breeding ground for terrorism,” David Dawe, senior economist at the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) tells IPS. “That’s a strong argument.”

Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Programme (WFP), another U.N. food agency based in Rome, also believes that empty stomachs feed trouble.

“A hungry world is a dangerous world,” Sheeran told reporters earlier this year. “Without food, people have only three options: they riot, they emigrate, or they die. None of these are acceptable.”

While these may indeed be “strong arguments” for powerful states to take action, their implications set some NGOs engaged in the war on hunger on edge. Some reject them outright.

“I don’t buy this argument that if we don’t do the right thing they’ll come over here and ruin our lives,” John Hilary, executive director of the London-based anti-poverty group War on Want tells IPS. “I think that’s too near to the far right and the British National Party.”

Oxfam International believes the self-interest case is valid, while harbouring concerns that it could be twisted by groups in developed countries to block immigration and imports from developing countries.

“It is true that it is in the developed world’s interest to eradicate hunger, but I also perceive some risks in this message,” Teresa Cavero, head of research at Oxfam’s Spanish section tells IPS.

“With the economic crisis and the temptation for greater protectionism, it could be a double-edged sword. For example, it could be said that by encouraging growth in developing countries, people will have more job opportunities in their homelands and there will be less migration. This may be correct in part, but it does not mean immigration is a bad thing.”

It is also true, however, that decades of taking the developed world to task over the need to eradicate hunger as part of a quest for social justice has not been enormously successful.

It could be argued that the developed world will only find the necessary commitment to fighting hunger when the issue climbs to a higher position on the political agenda. And this may not come about unless voters in rich countries see food insecurity as a problem that is in their self-interest to solve.

“I’m more comfortable with the justice message, but it’s right that it’s in the developed world’s interest to fight hunger, and any arguments you build to make the developed countries take action are positive,” Cavero says.

“The first thing governments and people in rich countries need to be aware of is the reality we are confronted with. Today we have more and more people in hunger, and the WFP have announced the shameful figure of one billion hungry people has been passed.”

While fear is one factor that might stir the well-fed, Dawe sees money as another: “On the economic level, there is a huge reservoir of potential demand for developed world products in developing countries if people break out of hunger and poverty.”

Cavero agrees: “We at Oxfam are aware of the role trade can have in economic development if it is conducted under fair rules, which is not the case now, along with strong transparent markets. Healthy growth would lead to improvements in overall welfare, which is good for the South and good for the North.

“It is in the North’s interest to have a developing world that is not suffering hunger because the whole economy suffers. If they are free from hunger, they can work on their own development. But you must be free from hunger before you can overcome poverty, and only then can you participate in the global economy. Hunger is a dead weight that’s too heavy to allow welfare to be achieved.”

Cavero believes that highlighting the link between food security and the threat of climate change is another way to give developed countries an incentive to act. If developing countries try to eliminate poverty and hunger by following the North’s resource-energy intensive model of development, global temperatures are set to accelerate.

“To get an agreement and action on climate change we must first make sure the developing world, where most of the world’s poverty and hunger is concentrated among poor farming communities, is tackling food security in a sustainable way so that we can put policies into place to avoid a global disaster,” Cavero says.

“We must achieve this through a sustainable model of agriculture. There is a chance to achieve a win-win-win scenario – a win for food security, a win for climate change, and a win for social, economic and environmental sustainability.”

Dawe says the developed world would benefit from the contribution people freed of food insecurity could make to science and culture.

“We’re living in an interdependent world. All knowledge is built on the insights and contributions of others,” he says.

“The more smart people are working on a problem, whether it be AIDS or global warming or anything else, the closer you get to finding an answer. The same argument applies to culture, art, music and other fields.

“Hunger and food insecurity are holding people back from reaching their own potential and contributing to humanity’s potential. We’re not as rich as we could be and I don’t mean in material terms.”

War on Want still believes the battleground should be social justice, not self- interest.

“The scandal is that many people who are producing food in rural areas cannot afford to buy what they produce. That’s a serious condemnation of the model we’ve allowed to grow,” says Hilary.

“What we need is a less exploitative model of agriculture. Vast areas of the developing world are being turned over to cattle grazing, or soy for cattle or biofuels so the rich world can eat more meat and drive around in ecological cars when the priority should be ensuring there is enough affordable food for everyone.

“I do believe the moral case is strong and that hunger is a profound challenge to our idea of progress. If we thought that our privileged lives depended on exploitation, more would be done. It’s a moral and political question.”

Reposted from Inter Press Service (IPS).

 More than six decades of human rights failures by governments have been exacerbated by the world economic crisis, which brought the problems of poverty and inequality to the fore, according to Amnesty International’s Secretary General.“It’s not just the economy, it’s a human rights crisis: the world is sitting on a social, political and economic time bomb,” said Irene Kahn as she launched Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of the world’s human rights.Billions of people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity around the world. In many cases, the economic crisis made matters worse, with millions more sliding into poverty.

Increased poverty and deprivation have led to denial of economic and social rights – including food shortages and the use of food as a political weapon; forced evictions; abuse of rights of indigenous peoples. Yet human rights problems have been relegated to the backseat as political and business leaders grapple with the economic crisis.

2008 saw massive rises in the price of the most basic of necessities – food – which had the effect of making the poorest people in the world even poorer. People took to the streets across the world and, in many countries, were faced with violent repression.

In Zimbabwe, more than five million people were in need of food aid by the end of 2008, according to the UN. The government has used food as a weapon against its political opponents. Across the country, political opponents, human rights activists and trade union representatives were attacked, abducted, arrested and killed with impunity.

Hundreds of activists protesting against economic decline and social conditions were arrested and detained without charge.

Across Africa, people demonstrated against desperate social and economic situations and sharp rises in living costs. In a taste of what could lie ahead, some demonstrations turned violent; the authorities often repressed protests with excessive force.

Social tensions and economic disparities led to thousands of protests throughout China. In the Americas, social protest at economic conditions increased in Peru; in Chile there were demonstrations throughout 2008 on Indigenous People’s rights and rising living costs.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the economic and social insecurity was highlighted by strikes and protests in several countries, including Egypt. In Tunisia, strikes and protests were put down with force, causing two deaths, many injuries and more than 2,000 prosecutions of alleged organizers, some culminating in long prison sentences.

“The events we’ve seen in 2008, with the world economic crisis at the top, demand a new kind of leadership from world leaders,” said Irene Khan. “They must take real action, centred on human rights, to tackle growing poverty around the world, and they must invest in human rights as purposefully as they invest in economic growth.”  

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Amnesty International Report 2009

Materialistic people tend to form strong connections to particular product brands when their level of anxiety about death is high, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Authors Aric Rindfleisch (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Korea University), James E. Burroughs (University of Virginia), and Nancy Wong (University of Wisconsin-Madison) examined levels of materialism and insecurity in consumers and discovered that the combination of “death anxiety” and materialism led to strong attachment to brands.

While conventional wisdom holds that materialistic individuals are weakly connected to brands and use them as superficial status badges, the new research proves that brands hold more meaning for materialistic consumers than previously thought. When those individuals are also worried about death, their brand attachment grows.

“We propose that materialistic individuals form strong connections to their brands when death anxiety is high but not when death anxiety is low,” write the authors. “Materialistic individuals are strongly connected to their brands and employ them as an important source of meaning in their lives.”

The authors tested their hypothesis by conducting two different but related studies. The first study asked adults in the United States to rate their degrees of materialism, death anxiety, and brand connection. In the second study, conducted among college students, the researchers manipulated death anxiety by having participants consider their own deaths in detail. In both studies, participants rated their degree of connection to a variety of products including cars, microwaves, jeans, cell phones, MP3 players, and sunglasses.

“Materialistic consumers with anxiety about their existence are especially in need of the symbolic security that brand connections provide,” write the authors. “Given the recent rise in materialistic tendencies along with the media’s heightened focus on existential threats, the number of consumers who display this combination of values and motives should increase in the near future.”

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Aric Rindfleisch, James E. Burroughs, and Nancy Wong. “The Safety of Objects: Materialism, Existential Insecurity, and Brand Connection.” Journal of Consumer Research: June 2009.

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world’s population facing serious food shortages, new research shows.

To compound matters, the population of this equatorial belt – from about 35 degrees north latitude to 35 degrees south latitude – is among the poorest on Earth and is growing faster than anywhere else.

“The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Battisti is lead author of the study in the Jan. 9 edition of Science. He collaborated with Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, to examine the impact of climate change on the world’s food security.

“This is a compelling reason for us to invest in adaptation, because it is clear that this is the direction we are going in terms of temperature and it will take decades to develop new food crop varieties that can better withstand a warmer climate,” Naylor said.

“We are taking the worst of what we’ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation.”

By combining direct observations with data from 23 global climate models that contributed to Nobel prize-winning research in 2007, Battisti and Naylor determined there is greater than a 90 percent probability that by 2100 the lowest growing-season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than any temperatures recorded there to date.

They used the data as a filter to view historic instances of severe food insecurity, and concluded such instances are likely to become more commonplace. Those include severe episodes in France in 2003 and the Ukraine in 1972. In the case of the Ukraine, a near-record heat wave reduced wheat yields and contributed to disruptions in the global cereal market that lasted two years.

“I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food,” Naylor said. “But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies.”

The serious climate issues won’t be limited to the tropics, the scientists conclude. As an example, they cite record temperatures that struck Western Europe in June, July and August of 2003, killing an estimated 52,000 people. The summer-long heat wave in France and Italy cut wheat yields and fodder production by one-third. In France alone, temperatures were nearly 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term mean, and the scientists say such temperatures could be normal for France by 2100.

In the tropics, the higher temperatures can be expected to cut yields of the primary food crops, maize and rice, by 20 to 40 percent, the researchers said. But rising temperatures also are likely to play havoc with soil moisture, cutting yields even further.

“We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties but also recognizing that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now,” Naylor said.

Currently 3 billion people live in the tropics and subtropics, and their number is expected to nearly double by the end of the century. The area stretches from the southern United States to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia and all of Africa.

The scientists said that many who now live in these areas subsist on less than $2 a day and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

“When all the signs point in the same direction, and in this case it’s a bad direction, you pretty much know what’s going to happen,” Battisti said. “You are talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won’t be able to find it where they find it now.”

He said wheat makes up one-quarter of the calories consumed in India, but growth in wheat yields there have been stagnant for the last decade.

Temperature increases from climate change are expected to be less in equatorial regions than at higher latitudes, but because average temperatures in the tropics today are much higher than at midlatitudes, rising temperature will have a greater impact on crop yields in the tropics.

Recent UW research has shown that even with much smaller temperature increases in the tropics, the impacts of warmer climate will be greater there because life in the tropics does not encounter much temperature variation and so is less adaptable. That makes an even stronger case to begin now searching for ways to deal with substantially warmer conditions, Battisti said.

“You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it,” he said. “You also could mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place, but we’re not doing a very good job of that.”

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The National Science Foundation and the Tamaki Foundation funded the research.

For more information on the Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, see http://fse.stanford.edu.

WASHINGTON, DC – The incomes of American families with children have become increasingly stratified since 1975, with income inequality increasing two-thirds during a 30-year period, according to findings published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed science journal American Sociological Review.

“The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ is widening for families with children in the United States,” said Bruce Western, the study’s lead author and professor of sociology and director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University. “Inequality for these families has grown faster than the combined rates of inequality for all families and for men’s hourly wages.”

Unlike previous narrower research focusing on the effect of education, single parenthood or a mother’s employment on family income inequality, this study combined labor market and demographic analyses to identify inequalities. It used data from the March supplements of the Current Population Survey from 1976 to 2006, yielding annual income data from 1975 to 2005.

Sources of the widening gap included the growing income advantage for college graduates. Families with college-educated parents made increasingly more money than families headed by high school graduates. Also contributing to the gap: low-income single parents. By the early 2000s, nearly one-quarter of mothers were single. Single-parent families accounted for about a quarter of the growth in income inequality by 1993.

Despite these stratifying factors, some trends helped to close the gap between rich and poor. Increased rates of women’s employment balanced the growth of inequality resulting from single-parent families, while rising levels of education among parents helped to narrow the gap as well.

The researchers also examined income disparities within demographic groups categorized by education and family type. Incomes were the least variable within two-parent families with working mothers. Inequality was greatest within single-parent families without a working mother. Regardless of family type, the gap between high- and low-income families increased between 30 and 100 percent, making within-group inequality the leading cause of inequality for all families with children from 1975 to 2005.

“Our research suggests a broad increase in income insecurity that goes beyond low-skill workers and single parents and extends to families from every class,” Western said. “The polarization of family incomes among this generation has implications for the social and economic mobility of future generations and suggests the further erosion of the middle class in years to come.”

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The research was co-authored by Harvard University sociologists Christine Percheski, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, and Deirdre Bloome, a graduate student in sociology and social policy and a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. It was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and the New York University Center for Advanced Social Science Research.

The American Sociological Review is the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.

About the American Sociological Association

The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society.

Meanwhile, a related discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.

Jürgen Scheffran, a research scientist in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and the Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research at the University of Illinois, is among those raising concerns. In a survey of recent research published earlier this summer in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scheffran concluded that “the impact of climate change on human and global security could extend far beyond the limited scope the world has seen thus far.”

Scheffran’s review included a critical analysis of four trends identified in a report by the German Advisory Council on Global Change as among those most possibly destabilizing populations and governments: degradation of freshwater resources, food insecurity, natural disasters and environmental migration.

He also cited last year’s report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicating that climate change would affect species and ecosystems worldwide, from rainforests to coral reefs.

In his analysis, Scheffran noted that the number of world regions vulnerable to drought was expected to rise.

Water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover in major mountain ranges such as the Andes and Himalayas also are expected to decrease, he said.

“Most critical for human survival are water and food, which are sensitive to changing climatic conditions,” Scheffran said.

The degradation of these critical resources, combined with threats to populations caused by natural disasters, disease and crumbling economic and ecosystems, he said, could ultimately have “cascading effects.”

“Environmental changes caused by global warming will not only affect human living conditions but may also generate larger societal effects, by threatening the infrastructures of society or by inducing social responses that aggravate the problem,” he wrote. “The associated socio-economic and political stress can undermine the functioning of communities, the effectiveness of institutions, and the stability of societal structures. These degraded conditions could contribute to civil strife, and, worse, armed conflict.”

In fact, Scheffran said, there’s evidence that such dramas are already playing out on the world stage – whether already affected by climate change or not.

“Large areas of Africa are suffering from scarcity of food and fresh water resources, making them more vulnerable to conflict. An example is Sudan’s Darfur province where an ongoing conflict was aggravated since droughts forced Arab herders to move into areas of African farmers.”

Other regions of the world – including the Middle East, Central Asia and South America – also are being affected, he said.

With so much at stake, Scheffran recommends multiple strategies for forestalling otherwise insurmountable consequences. Among the most critical, he said, is for governments to incorporate measures for addressing climate change within national policy. Beyond that, he advocates a cooperative, international approach to addressing concerns.

“Although climate change bears a significant conflict potential, it can also transform the international system toward more cooperation if it is seen as a common threat that requires joint action,” he said.

One of the more hopeful, recent signs on that front, he said, was the 2007 Bali climate summit that brought together more than 10,000 representatives from throughout the world to draft a climate plan.

“The Bali Roadmap has many good ideas, but was criticized as being too vague to induce a major policy shift,” Scheffran said. “Nevertheless, the seeming conflict between environment and the economy will be best overcome with the recognition that protecting the climate in the best interest of the economy.”

In addition to global cooperation, Scheffran believes that those occupying Earth now can learn a lot about the future by studying the past.

“History has shown how dependent our culture is on a narrow window of climatic conditions for average temperature and precipitation,” he said. “The great human civilizations began to flourish after the last ice age, and some disappeared due to droughts and other adverse shifts in the climate. The so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ in the northern hemisphere a few hundred years ago was caused by an average drop in temperature of less than a degree Celsius.

“The consequences were quite severe in parts of Europe, associated with loss of harvest and population decline,” Scheffran said.  “Riots and military conflicts became more likely, as a recent empirical study has suggested.”

However, as history has demonstrated, humans are quite capable of adapting to changing climate conditions as long as those changes are moderate.

“The challenge is to slow down the dynamics and stabilize the climate system at levels which are not dangerous,” Scheffran said.

He remains optimistic that this is still possible – in large part, because public awareness and educational efforts taking place today are making concerns about climate change a priority.

“Global warming receives now more public and political attention than a few years ago,” Scheffran said.

“Grass-roots movements are emerging in the United States for protecting the climate and developing energy alternatives, involving not only many local communities and companies but also influential states such as California, led by Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger.”

Further evidence that the issue is being taken seriously at last, Scheffran said, is coming from the campaign trail.

“Congressional and presidential candidates now acknowledge that something has to be done to play a leading role on energy and climate change to not fall behind the rest of the world,” he said.

Reprinted from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.