This past week, I attended the annual Nairobi International Trade Fair, which is sponsored by the Agricultural Society of Kenya. Similar to a 4-H County Fair in the United States, which features children’s activities alongside agricultural displays, the fair’s marketed purpose is to educate the public on programs, companies, and organizations that work with Kenya’s agricultural and environmental sectors. Despite these good intentions, the Nairob...
...n problematic, and even unapologetically damaging. Chinese construction companies and contractors displace workers by the hundreds of thousands by stipulating unfair quotas that predominantly employ Chinese laborers. Pledging agricultural and medical transfers, Chinese technicians and doctors often exclusively use Chinese products, which are largely unaffordable and unavailable in rural areas. Chinese products have also flooded African markets, o...
...way to really prevent this in the large scale is to slow down the rate of warming on the planet. That’s what we need to do. And if we don’t, there’ll be a whole number of destabilizing things. We’re already seeing effects on agricultural production. We’re seeing effects on people needing to migrate. We’re seeing effects on health especially in the worst parts of the world. All these things sort of snowball into chaotic and miserable situations....
...ivalent crisis would bring to an overcrowded city in the developing world, with no flood-mitigation infrastructure in place to lessen the damage. Meanwhile, as rising temperatures, changing environmental factors, and existing agricultural practices exacerbate the problem of water scarcity in already dry regions, soil depletion and erosion are becoming the norm. In China’s Gobi Desert, 10,000 fertile acres are lost each year to desertification, pu...
If you are what you eat, then America is corn. It’s in just about everything we eat: soda, ketchup, English muffins, breakfast cereal, cookies, crackers, ice cream, BBQ sauce… hell, even cough syrup. It feeds the cattle that go into your hamburger. And now it’s going into our gas tanks as ethanol. It’s one of the nation’s most subsidized agricultural products; subsidies to corn farmers totaled about $5 billion in 2006. Recent increases in demand...
...deforestation fed by a growing hunger for paper goods. The consequences proved dire: huge sandstorms, known to locals as “yellow dragons,” struck major cities in the north, including the capital city Beijing, large tracts of agricultural land were degraded, and little grassland remained to feed herds of sheep and cattle roaming the lands of inner Mongolia. The GGW, part of a larger national effort to increase forestation, was a response to this...
...ial to create a social and environmental catastrophe. Fracking, the method used to extract the reserves, is a doublet threat. It not only pollutes groundwater, jeopardizing the livelihoods of the millions who depend on it for agricultural and domestic purposes, but it also brings less obvious health and environmental dangers in the form of gas escaping to the surface. Politicians such as Jeff Seeney, the Deputy Premier of Queensland, have taken a...
...energy in the developing world, one interesting study is Brazil which, besides its newly found oil, is also a leader in hydro-power (not without environmental issues) and biofuels which it is producing economically alongside agricultural production. The luck of geology, carbon deposits, and the power of engineering still combine with the basic forces of macroeconomics to drive energy policy in both the developing and developed worlds. Before a...
...throne, Raúl has enacted various reforms—some simply cosmetic, such as opening unaffordable hotels with overpriced Internet access to a poor population, but some more real, like the granting of the right to privately develop agricultural lands. He has also replaced key members of the party with his own personal team of followers, leading to his ousting of the prominent Felipe Roque and Carlos Lage, sparking wild speculations as to what they coul...
...them harvest it and do their normal [thing] with it. I think that still illustrates the problem. We were there. We could have destroyed the crops and alienated everyone. Narayan: … Farmers in Marjah were said to be asking for agricultural supplies. They are asking for infrastructure to change. All the farmers are ready to move away from opium production. Jervis: I just don’t know if it’s within the realm of what we could deliver. I certainly agre...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments