Day: August 1, 2017

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has called an emergency meeting this Wednesday in South Africa of all countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) following an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Aid workers are concerned what this could mean for food security in the region, where a fall armyworm invasion and drought have decimated crops in recent years.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says besides Zimbabwe, the other countries in the region hit by the avian influenza outbreak are the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.

While officials haven’t released figures for the numbers of birds affected, the FAO said the outbreak is currently concentrated in one province of Zimbabwe and three in South Africa. Earlier this year, the FAO issued a warning to the SADC regional bloc, after the virus was detected in the Lake Victoria area in East Africa.

David Phiri, the head of FAO in Southern Africa, told VOA it is urgent to contain the outbreak.

“Avian influenza is a trans-boundary pest and disease, and it can move from one country to another, from one site to another. So there is a possibility, very easily that it could spread in those particular countries or even beyond the borders. For this reason, we need to control it and to also ensure that there is also prevention measures – both by the countries affected and other countries that have not been affected….”

“Poultry is what a lot of families depend on for protein. It is the cheapest protein. It [The outbreak] is also coming in the backdrop of two years of heavy droughts, last being affected by El Nino. That was a disaster itself for the sub-region. More recently, we have had an outbreak of fall armyworm which has affected some farmers very, very badly. So we cannot afford another very serious outbreak that could reduce food security and livelihoods in the sub-region,” he said.

Dr. Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatolu, chief veterinary officer of the Zimbabwe Ministry of Agriculture, has this advice for farmers.

“Just make sure that birds that are produced do not have contact with anything from outside that is not well-managed. Sometimes in traditional systems, people receive poultry as gifts and they put it among the poultry that they are having at home. That is very dangerous. Normally, some of these viruses can cause diseases in people, but this one is a bit different. That gives a bit of joy, but it is not easy to deal with because it spreads very quickly and it kills birds. So those doing businesses with high numbers of birds are very, very susceptible,” said Obatolu.

In recent years, African countries have responded to avian flu outbreaks by closing their borders to poultry imports and culling large numbers of exposed birds.
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A report released this week found that climate change is part of the reasons why Indian farmers are increasingly destitute and committing suicide.  

Each year, 130,000 people die by suicide in India, many of them farmers in significant debt.  This review of three decades of weather and suicide data marks the first effort to quantify the role that climate change may play in this crisis in India, where the suicide rate has doubled since 1980.  And it is one of the first attempts to study the relationship between suicide and climate change.

Tamma Carleton, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the report.  She found that nearly 70 additional suicides would occur for each day and each degree Celsius of temperature rise.  It’s important to note that the effect only occurred during the growing season.

In total, Carleton estimates that climate change has contributed to 59,300 deaths in India over the past three decades, and accounts for 6.8 percent of the increase.  The report is a stark reminder that humans have already begun to see the effects of climate change.

There have been previous attempts to quantify death toll from climate change, which is generally harder to quantify than effects like displacement due to sea-level rise.  A 2015 report commissioned by the governments of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations concluded that climate change was already killing 400,000 people each year though impacts like heat waves, communicable disease, flooding, and decreased crop yields.

But most of these efforts have either been focused globally or on developed countries, says Marshall Burke, assistant professor at Stanford University, who was not associated with the study.  “One of the nice contributions here is that it’s a broad scale look at the country that’s going to have the largest global population,” he told VOA.

In examining the data, Carleton looked for signals that farmers were able to adapt in any way.  For example, if they were more sensitive to short-term warming than long-term warming, that could indicate that farmers had been able to adapt over the long-term. But she found no evidence of any adaptation, and says there is a larger lesson to be learned from this.

“There’s a lot of optimism often about the future of climate because there’s sort of an assumption or a hope that we will adapt as the temperatures gradually warm,” she told VOA.  “It hasn’t looked like it’s been easy to adapt in the past and so it’s concerning when we think about what this might mean for the future.”

Burke said researchers have looked for adaptation in other ways and that those results were consistent with what Carleton found.

While researchers have extensively investigated the effect that climate change has on the environment, this report is one of the first to consider how climate change may be affecting human populations.  “There’s a lot of basic things about human responses to changes in climate that we still don’t understand, and that’s why I think papers like this are so important,” said Burke.

In 2015, an Indian farmer died after hanging himself outside a protest in New Delhi, drawing national attention to the issue and forcing a response by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Protesters have since returned to the capital saying that campaign promises of crop insurance and loan forgiveness have not been met.  

Carleton comes from a long line of farmers and as a child, most of her food came from the garden.  “Growing my own food has been something that I’ve absolutely enjoyed… and it’s really heartbreaking to see that in many other parts of the world this occupation is so difficult and so stressful that some are choosing to commit suicide.”
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The last time a total solar eclipse blacked out the sun in Oregon nearly 40 years ago, Gene Brick was working in a timber mill that refused to shut down for the spectacle.   

The World War II veteran and amateur astronomer was devastated when his friends raved about experiencing a pitch-dark sky in the middle of the day.

“Everyone who was outside got to see it, and they enjoyed telling me all about it — and I was hurt by that,” said Brick, now 92. “But work is work, you know.”

Brick will get another chance to witness history this month, when a total solar eclipse begins its path across the U.S. in Oregon.

Coast to coast event

The one he missed in 1979 covered the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. This total eclipse will be visible from coast to coast across the nation — something that hasn’t happened in 99 years.

Brick plans to watch the event with his son using two telescopes: a fancy new one and one the two crafted together 53 years ago in their basement.

The men will peer at the sun through both during the eclipse’s totality, when the moon’s shadow completely covers the sun for just over two minutes. They also will use special filters to photograph the eclipse through the newer machine.

For Brick, who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler during the Battle of Okinawa, the opportunity is the experience of a lifetime.

“I always loved to look at the moon,” he said, after peering through the telescope the pair crafted in 1964. “I still do.”

Prime location for viewing

The Bricks will have a prime location for their father-son moment. The town of Madras, in central Oregon, is in the high desert, where summertime skies are often clear and cloudless. Up to 100,000 people are expected to flock to the town and surrounding Jefferson County for the Aug. 21 event, creating worries about overcrowding and traffic.

Brick’s son, Bartt Brick, is on the Madras City Council and will be on call during the eclipse. But taking the time to watch the event with his father is important to him. The elder Brick got the last four credits he needed for his high school diploma by signing up for the U.S. Navy and never attended college — but even in his 90s, he’s studying particle physics.

The pair decided to build the telescope when the younger Brick was 14, after finding a piece of glass in his late grandfather’s garage that was hand-ground into a concave lens for a telescope. Gene Brick worked long, hard days cutting logs at the mill then stayed up into the night working on the project with his teenage son.

“We’d bought ourselves a book on telescopes and a new dictionary, and after about — what — four or five months, we had a telescope,” Bartt Brick recalled on a recent summer day.

“I’d sleep about half the night,” his father added with a chuckle.

Spotted Ring Nebula

The two dragged the telescope outside on the night they finished, aimed it toward the heavens by propping it on a stepladder, and peered into the night sky until they spied the Ring Nebula, a dying star in a constellation about 2,000 light years from Earth.

“We were so excited, we ran in and told Mom. But at 2 o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t as thrilled as we were,” the younger Brick said.

Over the years, the telescope got a lot of use from the family and from a string of neighborhood children who lined up most evenings to peer at the moon.

But when the 1979 total solar eclipse came along, the elder Brick was working, the younger Brick no longer lived at home, and the telescope went unused.

When Bartt Brick moved back to Madras three years ago, the stars aligned for another crack at a shared celestial show.

Three generations will gather

On Aug. 21, three generations of Bricks will assemble. They’ll have a sleek black, new telescope equipped with a remote control and a USB cord for snapping photos through a computer.

But they’ll also have on hand the unassuming, unmounted metal cylinder they worked on so long ago.

“Dad’s had a message for me ever since I was 2 years old, and it was, ‘Be curious,’” Bartt Brick said. “And boy, did I learn how to be curious with this.”
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Brazil Investigates Amazon Plane Crash Killing Environment Officials

TORONTO –

Brazil is investigating a plane crash in which three environmental enforcement agents were killed, a government spokesman said on Monday, a case which is the latest blow to efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest.

The plane carrying agents with Brazil’s environment enforcement agency (IBAMA) crashed earlier this month in Roraima, Brazil’s least populated state, on the country’s northern border with Venezuela.

Three environmental enforcement agents and a pilot died in the crash while on a mission to combat illegal mining, deforestation and other crimes, officials said. One agent survived with severe burns.

IBAMA spokesman Tiago Costa told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that federal officials are investigating the cause of the crash but it is unclear when they will report their findings.

“Olavo Perim Galvão, Alexandre Rochinski and Sebastião Lima Pereira Júnior dedicated their lives to the defense of the environment with extreme professionalism and commitment,” IBAMA said in a statement commemorating the dead agents.

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose by 29 percent last year to the highest level in eight years, according to government data.

Most of this deforestation is caused by illegal activity, according to IBAMA.

The rise in deforestation comes alongside an increase in deadly conflicts over land and resources in the Amazon, according to campaigners, who blame impunity and other factors for worsening conditions.

“All across the Amazon, crimes against local communities and the environment are spiraling out of control,” Marcio Astrini, a spokesman for Greenpeace in Brazil said in a statement earlier this month. “The people who call the forest home, and the forest itself, have always been victims of a lack of governance.”

Brazil is the world’s most dangerous nation for land rights and environmental activists, according to a report from the London-based campaign group Global Witness released this month.

At least 49 land rights campaigners were killed in Latin America’s largest country last year, with more than 80 percent of those killings taking place in the Amazon.

 
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