Climate Change is Driving Millions to the Precipice of a ‘Raging Food Catastrophe’

 

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11122022/kenya-somalia-africa-famine-hunger-climate-change/

 

By Georgina Gustin
December 11, 2022

 

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Nearly 26 million people in the Horn of Africa are facing extreme hunger, with some areas already reaching catastrophic famine levels, according to the United Nations. The situation here is unfolding as a food crisis threatens a record number of people around the world, with nearly 345 million at acute levels of hunger and nearly 50 million people on the brink of famine.

“We are on the way to a raging food catastrophe,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres tweeted recently. 

This year’s droughts and severe weather diminished or decimated crops across the world—in parts of the United States, Europe, China, Australia and the Indian subcontinent.

The current emergency foreshadows what researchers call “multiple breadbasket” failures, which will likely occur more often and with greater intensity as Earth’s atmosphere warms. Battered by more climate-induced weather shocks or chronic conditions like drought, the world’s farmers are projected to produce less food in coming decades as the global population rises toward 10 billion.

“There are other drivers of food insecurity,” said Francesco Tubiello, a senior statistician at the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO. “But those related to climate change will increase and become more and more important.”

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Farther north, camel caravans start appearing at the roadside as they travel to points for their weekly watering. And then odd shapes also begin to appear.

A frame of bones, too big to be a donkey or cow: a camel carcass, its orange-white ribs poking out of the sand after weeks in the sun. Down the road, another camel that recently collapsed, an eye pecked out by birds already, with fresh blood still pooling in the socket.

In Marsabit County, to the west, a sandy track crosses a maroon rockscape that meets the horizon in every direction. Empty plastic bottles glint under the sun. Mere yards separate one pile of camel bones from the next.

“If the camels die, that’s the end of everything,” said Patrick Katelo, PACIDA’s director. “Even these animals cannot make it now.”

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Droughts and famines in the Horn of Africa have killed at least 3 million people in the past 50 years. It’s a chronically dry, famine-prone place. But the parched, heated conditions now are being amplified by warm air carried from greenhouse gas-heated waters thousands of miles away in the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the droughts are occurring with greater severity and more often, leaving people and animals insufficient time to recover.

This part of Africa, which relies on two rainy seasons, has not seen adequate rain for five seasons running. Meteorologists and climate scientists are predicting a sixth below-average rainy season next spring, which would mean rain has not fallen reliably or adequately for three straight years.

“This is unprecedented,” said Rupsha Banerjee, a drought and livestock expert with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi. 

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For Ali and millions like her, the forces behind her suffering are abstract and distant notions. But for officials overseeing aid to refugees, there is a direct line between the behaviors of rich countries, which are largely to blame for climate change, and her family’s misfortunes.

“These are communities that have contributed nothing to climate change, but they’re the ones staring, literally, into the face of the climate crisis,” said Gemma Connell, who heads the southern and eastern Africa regional office of the U.N’.s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “It’s just devastating to see people who’ve done nothing go through this.”

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Chilli peppers, coffee, wine: how the climate crisis is causing food shortages

 

Contributing to inflation.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/28/climate-crisis-food-shortages

 

Victoria Namkung
Tue 28 Jun 2022 06.00 EDT

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Huy Fong Foods, the southern California company that produces 20m bottles of sriracha annually, has experienced a low inventory of red jalapeño chilli peppers in recent years made worse by spring’s crop failure.

The cause? Severe weather and drought conditions in Mexico.

It’s not just chilli peppers. Mustard producers in France and Canada said extreme weather caused a 50% reduction in seed production last year, leading to a shortage of the condiment on grocery store shelves. Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods, fires and changes in rainfall patterns are also affecting the cost and availability of staples, including wheat, corn, coffee, apples, chocolate and wine. The climate crisis is increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events – and it’s putting food production at risk.

“Almost everything we grow and raise in the US is facing some climatic stress,” said Carolyn Dimitri, nutrition and food studies professor at NYU.

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 The impact of the climate crisis on grain crops extends beyond the US. In India, a fierce heatwave damaged the wheat crop due to record-setting temperatures throughout the spring and summer. As Delhi hit 120F in May, the government placed a ban on wheat exports, driving up prices even further than the rise following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Climate change could seriously affect the global production of maize and wheat as early as 2030, a 2021 Nasa study found, with maize crop yields estimated to decline by 24%.

Apples are another food already at risk. Last year’s apple harvest in Michigan and Wisconsin was compromised because of heavy frost in the spring. According to the USDA, changes in climate, such as warming, can lead to smaller yields, lower growth and changes in the fruit’s quality.

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Extreme weather is affecting the cost of coffee. Between April 2020 and December 2021, coffee prices increased 70% after droughts and frost destroyed crops in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee-producing country. The economic ramifications could be profound, since it’s estimated that as many as 120 million of the world’s poorest depend on coffee production for their survival.

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The Biden administration is supporting research into “climate-smart” agriculture, an approach to managing cropland, forest, fisheries and livestock that attempts to address the intersecting challenges of the climate crisis and food security.

In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said that climate-related disasters and extreme weather were a driver of global hunger and that 1.7 billion people have been affected by the climate crisis over the last decade.

Experts say unless action is taken, we can expect to see increased food prices, decreased availability and conflict over water, which will primarily affect poorer countries and low-income Americans, straining everything from school lunches to food aid programs.

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Nearly 6 million children are driven into severe hunger by the hot, dry shifts of a strong el Niño

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/931018

 

 News Release 12-Oct-2021
Peer-Reviewed Publication
University of Chicago

 

Over the last year and a half, the 1-in-100-year Covid-19 pandemic drove millions of children into hunger. But every four to seven years, an El Niño causes weather patterns to shift across the tropics, leading to warmer temperatures and precipitation changes and widespread impacts on agriculture, infectious diseases, conflicts and more. During a single bad El Niño, nearly 6 million children are driven into undernutrition as a result, according to a study in Nature Communications. That’s at least 70 percent and perhaps up to three times the number of children who have gone hungry because of the pandemic.

“It would have been very difficult to prepare the world for a pandemic that few saw coming, but we can’t say the same about El Niño events that have a potentially much greater impact on the long-term growth and health of children,” says Amir Jina, an author of the paper and assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. “Scientists can forecast an approaching El Niño up to 6 months in advance, allowing the international community to intervene to prevent the worst impacts. Our study helps to quantify those impacts on child nutrition to guide global public investments in food insecure areas.”

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 While it is unclear whether climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of El Niño, climate change will cause hot areas to become hotter and dry areas to become drier. When El Niño is layered on top of these overall shifts, there is no doubt that the impacts during El Niño years will be worse than they are now.  For example, as areas expect to lose crops with climate change, those same areas will likely lose even more crops during El Niño years.

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Climate change has pushed a million people in Madagascar to the edge of starvation, UN says

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/23/africa/madagascar-food-crisis-climate-change-famine-intl/index.html?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=a0356b454d-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-a0356b454d-328507972

 

By Amy Cassidy, David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek, CNN
Updated 11:32 AM ET, Wed June 23, 2021

Climate change is the driving force of a developing food crisis in southern Madagascar, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.
The African island has been plagued with back-to-back droughts -- its worst in four decades -- which have pushed 1.14 million people "right to the very edge of starvation," said WFP executive director David Beasley in a news release Wednesday.
"I met women and children who were holding on for dear life, they'd walked for hours to get to our food distribution points. These were the ones who were healthy enough to make it," Beasley said.

"Families are suffering and people are already dying from severe hunger. This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change. This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now, they're the ones paying the highest price."An estimated 14,000 people are already in catastrophic conditions, according to the WFP, a number that is predicted to double to 28,000 by October. Thousands in southern Madagascar have left their homes in search

 of food, while those who remain are resorting to extreme measures such as foraging for wild food to survive, the WFP said.

"This is enough to bring even the most hardened humanitarian to tears. Families have been living on raw red cactus fruits, wild leaves and locusts for months now. We can't turn our backs on the people living here while the drought threatens thousands of innocent lives," said Beasley. 

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Grocery taxes put low-income families at risk for food insecurity

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/cu-gtp052621.php

 

News Release 26-May-2021
Cornell University

 

Approximately one-third of all U.S. counties do not exempt grocery foods from the general sales tax, which means the lowest-income families living in those areas are most susceptible to food insecurity. New research from Cornell University finds that even a slight grocery tax-rate increase could be problematic for many.

"An increase of 1% to 4% may sound small, but after several trips to the grocery store, the extra costs can create serious burdens for the lowest-income families," said co-author Harry Kaiser, professor of applied economics and management in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. "We found that even the slightest increase in tax rate correlated to an increased likelihood of food insecurity. Grocery taxes that rose by just one percentage point led to a higher risk of hunger in households."

The study focused on sales taxes on foods at retail outlets such as grocery and convenience stores. Kaiser and his co-authors found that, across 14 states, the average grocery tax is just over 4%.



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In Alabama, for example, where the grocery tax rate is as high as 9%, the average annual expense in grocery taxes is $630. For households living at or near the poverty level, this tax expense represents a sizeable portion of their household income.

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Global food, hunger challenges projected to increase mortality, disability by 2050

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/ifpr-gfh051821.php

 

News Release 20-May-2021
New study shows climate change will increase the challenge of meeting nutrition and food needs of a growing population, especially in Africa south of the Sahara, but policy actions initiated now could help avert this additional burden
International Food Policy Research Institute

 

A new study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and RTI International (RTI) projects that global chronic and hidden hunger will increase the overall years of life lost due to premature mortality and years lived with disability, also known as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), globally by over 30 million by 2050 relative to 2010. Expected impacts of climate change on the availability and access to nutritious food will exacerbate this change in DALYs by almost 10 percent.


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Study calls for urgent climate change action to secure global food supply

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/cu-scf040721.php

 

News Release 8-Apr-2021
Curtin University

 

New Curtin University-led research has found climate change will have a substantial impact on global food production and health if no action is taken by consumers, food industries, government, and international bodies.

Published in one of the highest-ranking public health journals, the Annual Review of Public Health, the researchers completed a comprehensive 12-month review of published literature on climate change, healthy diet and actions needed to improve nutrition and health around the world.

Lead researcher John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor Colin Binns, from the Curtin School of Population Health at Curtin University, said climate change has had a detrimental impact on health and food production for the past 50 years and far more needs to be done to overcome its adverse effects.

"The combination of climate change and the quality of nutrition is the major public health challenge of this decade and, indeed, this century. Despite positive advances in world nutrition rates, we are still facing the ongoing threat of climate change to our global food supply, with Sub-Saharan Africa and part of Asia most at risk" Professor Binns said.

"For the time being, it will be possible to produce enough food to maintain adequate intakes, using improved farming practices and technology and more equity in distribution, but we estimate that by 2050 world food production will need to increase by 50 per cent to overcome present shortages and meet the needs of the growing population.

"Our review recommends that by following necessary dietary guidelines and choosing foods that have low environmental impacts, such as fish, whole grain cereals, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, berries, and olive oil, would improve health, help reduce greenhouse gases and meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which in turn would improve food production levels in the future."


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Time to shift from 'food security' to 'nutrition security' to increase health and well-being

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/tuhs-tts040121.php

 

News Release 1-Apr-2021
Tufts and Georgetown scientists, and humanitarian José Andrés, call for a new approach to address food and nutrition inequities
Tufts University, Health Sciences Campus

 

In the 1960s, a national focus on hunger was essential to address major problems of undernutrition after World War II. In the 1990s, the nation shifted away from hunger toward "food insecurity" to better capture and address the challenges of food access and affordability.

Now, a new Viewpoint article argues that today's health and equity challenges call for the U.S. to shift from "food insecurity" to "nutrition insecurity" in order to catalyze appropriate focus and policies on access not just to food but to healthy, nourishing food.


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‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/02/us-unemployed-millions-without-benefits

 

Michael Sainato
Tue 2 Mar 2021 03.00 EST

•••••

State unemployment systems continue experiencing long delays, backlogs of unemployed claims, errors and long arbitration periods that have left millions of workers in the US without any unemployment benefits while they are out of work due to the coronavirus pandemic.

An analysis of unemployed workers in January 2021 by the labor economist Eliza Forsythe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, estimated unemployment systems are currently only reaching at most 30% of all unemployed workers, leaving an estimated 8 million unemployed Americans not receiving benefits.

Several states still have thousands of unemployed claims backlogged. Total initial weekly unemployment claims have declined in recent weeks but have remained higher than the worst week of the 2008 recession for 49 straight weeks. The US labor market currently has 9.9m fewer jobs than before the pandemic.

According to a Washington Post analysis in January 2021, more than 1.2 million Americans were waiting on appeals to denied unemployment claims or for their initial claims to be processed.

Officially the US unemployment rate is 6.3% but as the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, noted last month the real unemployment rate in the US is closer to 10% when misclassification errors are taken into account.

•••••

Jackie Warner of Lakewood, New Jersey, lost her position in payroll when the pandemic started in March 2020. It took until May to start receiving benefits, and she hasn’t received anything since her pandemic benefits expired in December 2020.

“This has been an awful time for many of us. When we call the Reemployment Center we cannot get through on the phones. There is a message that states to call back the next day. The next day never comes,” said Warner. “It’s still a mess.”

The Biden administration’s $1.9tn Covid relief plan passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on Saturday. It would pay $1,400 to struggling Americans if it passes in the Senate. But for those struggling now, there is little relief.

Warner has applied for dozens of jobs around her area through the pandemic, with no luck, while she has no income because her unemployment benefits have yet to restart.

“I’ve lost my health insurance; my car is in desperate need of repairs and I do not have money to buy food,” added Warner.

Why Billions In Food Aid Hasn't Gotten To Needy Families

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/15/953963243/why-billions-in-food-aid-hasnt-gotten-to-needy-families

 
January 15, 20215:07 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Anya Kamanet

 

When schools shut down in the spring, that raised immediate worries about the nearly 30 million children who depend on school food. Those worries were essentially borne out, with researchers reporting a large rise in child hunger.

According to a report from Feeding America, 1 in 4 households with children experienced food insecurity in 2020. "These are just levels that we've never seen before," says Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University.

Typically, she says, when families are having trouble stretching their food budget, the adults will go without food before allowing the children to go hungry. But in April, with shutdowns at their most acute, nearly 20% of mothers said their children themselves didn't have enough to eat. That's compared with fewer than 5% in 2018.

School food programs have been working hard: offering groceries, pre-prepared meals and everything in between. But as we've reported, it often isn't enough.

One federal program did make a difference. Congress passed a law giving families the cash value of the meals they missed when schools were closed.

•••••

Lauren Bauer, a scholar for the Brookings Institution, estimated that all by itself, Pandemic EBT, as it was known, lifted between 2.7 million and 3.9 million children out of hunger.

But that was last spring.

Congress reauthorized the benefits for this current school year on Oct. 1. And the benefit was supposed to be extended to younger children as well. The potential value, estimates Bauer: $12 billion.

So far, so good. But the plan ran into a wall of bureaucracy. One complication was that this fall, not every school around the country was closed all month. Closures varied week to week, state to state, district to district, and even school to school.

States were supposed to calculate the number of missed meals and give the money out equitably. But, Bauer explains, "the states are not getting good guidance from USDA about how to simplify the implementation of the program. And so as a result, everything has been in a holding pattern."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't issue guidance to states on plans for how to do this for six weeks. So far, they have approved only the plans from Massachusetts, Indiana and Rhode Island. And they haven't yet touched the issue of how to give out the money to children under 6.

•••••

Guatemalan families mourn death of children as hunger spreads

While some in the U.S. think that wearing a mask to protect others and themselves from Covid-19 is a horrible thing to bear with.

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guatemala-hunger-idUSKBN29K1PU

By Sofia Menchu

January 15, 20219:08 AM

 
Two-year-old Yesmin Anayeli Perez died this week of illnesses linked to malnutrition, the third small child to die from similar causes in an impoverished mountain village in eastern Guatemala within weeks, residents and health officials said.

Residents of the indigenous Mayan village, La Palmilla, and other parts of a region known as the Dry Corridor sunk deeper into poverty last year when economic damage wrought by droughts and two devastating hurricanes was compounded by the coronavirus lockdown.

The situation in La Palmilla is a stark example of the depth of the crisis in Central America, where governments are hoping for a rapid restoration of U.S. aid under incoming president Joe Biden to stem a new migration wave.

•••••

Government data show acute malnutrition among the under-fives rose by 80% in Guatemala in 2020 compared to 2019.

The government said the jump was partly due to improved methodology. However, data gathered by Oxfam last year also showed large increases in families facing food shortages, including a four-fold jump in severe shortages in the province around La Palmilla.

•••••

The two hurricanes in November wiped out his field of beans, leaving only corn in the ground, and the walls of his mud-block house cracked with the rain, letting the winter chill inside.

•••••

An 11-year-old boy used his birthday money to buy Chick-fil-A for the homeless - and now the chain is putting him in a commercial

https://news.yahoo.com/11-old-boy-used-birthday-212910041.html

INSIDER
Rachel Askinasi
Fri, December 25, 2020, 4:29 PM EST

While many 11-year-olds ask for birthday presents, one boy decided to donate his gift of $150. Rather than donating the money outright, he used it to buy Chick-fil-A for his local homeless community.

"During the pandemic, a lot of people lost their jobs so they don't have a lot of food and toys for their kid," Brycen Gault told WJBF.

Gault's mother, Lakeya Collins, told the news network that she and her son bought 20 meals from the chain that wants us all to "eat more chikin" and dropped them off for members of the homeless community.

•••••

"As we were pulling away from feeding the homeless for his birthday, he said, 'Mom do you feel that?'" Collins explained. "I said 'feel what?' he said, 'Those chills from God.' Honestly, I felt those chills from God."

•••••

SNAP benefits yield greatest economic output, research says

https://news.yahoo.com/aid-bill-13-billion-food-003232726.html

 

NBC News
Martha C. White
Wed, December 23, 2020, 7:32 PM EST

The $13 billion boost in food stamp benefits in the new coronavirus aid bill isn't some kind of giveaway to the poor — it's some of the best stimulus government money can buy.

Economists say the new increase for food stamps, known as SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, through June wouldn't just help those going hungry during the pandemic. It would also boost the economy more than other kinds of stimulus spending.

Every dollar spent on SNAP turns into $1.73 in economic activity, compared to $1.36 for every dollar spent on federal aid to state governments and $1.29 for every dollar allocated for a payroll tax holiday, according to Moody's Analytics researchers.

Meanwhile, cutting the corporate tax rate yields a paltry 30 cents per dollar.

"Every dollar in SNAP benefits boosts the economy," said Luis Guardia, president of the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center. "It helps strengthen the existing food supply and the mechanisms that support that."

•••••

The Agriculture Department found that SNAP spending has 10 times the job creation impact of other transfer payments or federal expenditures, particularly in rural areas.

•••••

SNAP benefits are based on the Agriculture Department's Thrifty Food Plan, which calculates weekly food costs of about $40 a week for single adults, or $134.50 for a family of four.

The budget assumes that shoppers can buy in bulk to get lower prices. That isn't always possible for families who live paycheck to paycheck.

•••••

Because of the pandemic, the number of Americans estimated to be at risk of going hungry has risen from 35 million to nearly 50 million, according to estimates by the nonprofit Feeding America.

Much of that new need is coming from people who've never had to reach for food stamps before.

•••••

Nearly 26 million Americans are going hungry the week of Thanksgiving

 https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/3841527655859802

Robert Reich
Nov. 25, 2020

A staggering one in EIGHT Americans reported they sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat in the past week. That’s nearly 26 million Americans who are going hungry the week of Thanksgiving. And a full quarter of out-of-work Americans with children at home reported not having enough food to eat. The numbers are worse for Black households than for white ones: 22 percent of Black households reported going hungry in the past week, over 2.5 times the rate for white households. Food banks are overwhelmed trying to meet the new surge in demand: “We'll be hard pressed to keep up. We’re just bracing for the worst,” said the CEO of Feeding Texas.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate last week and let them skip town early for Thanksgiving. He and his do nothing Senate Republicans get to go home to their families and sit down to a table bursting with food, while 26 million of their fellow Americans starve. As long as their rich friends are happy now that the stock market is soaring, they couldn’t be bothered to serve their constituents. It’s one of the grossest abdications of duty I’ve ever seen. There are no words to truly describe Mitch McConnell’s moral bankruptcy.

'No end in sight': hunger surges in America amid a spiraling pandemic

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/nov/25/us-hunger-surges-spiraling-pandemic

Nina Lakhani in New York and Maanvi Singh in Oakland
Wed 25 Nov 2020 04.00 EST

Millions of Americans must rely on charity to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table this year, as hunger surges amid a devastating spiraling of the Covid-19 pandemic which the Trump administration has failed to get under control.

In what is traditionally a season of celebration, less than half of US households with children feel “very confident” about having enough money to afford the food needed over the next month, according to the US Census Bureau’s latest pandemic survey. A staggering 5.6m households struggled to put enough food on the table in the past week.

Families of color are suffering disproportionately with 27% of black and 23% of Latino respondents with children reported not having enough to eat sometimes or often over the past week – compared with 12% of white people.

Overall food insecurity has doubled since last year due to record unemployment and underemployment rates. For families with children, hunger is three times higher than in 2019, according to analysis by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the non-partisan Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

•••••

Hunger is not new in America. Even before the pandemic, 35 million people relied on food banks every year, according to Feeding America. But the pandemic has been catastrophic – despite initial lauded federal interventions such as the stimulus cheques and enhanced unemployment benefit. As many as 50 million people could experience hunger this year, including a quarter of all children.

U.S. judge strikes down USDA rule on food benefits during pandemic

https://news.yahoo.com/u-judge-strikes-down-usda-101752563.html

Bhargav Acharya
,Reuters•October 19, 2020

A U.S. federal judge has struck down a Trump administration rule that would have cut food stamp benefits to almost 700,000 unemployed Americans amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, court documents showed.

•••••

In March, the judge had granted a preliminary injunction and a stay on part of the rule, which was scheduled to take effect on April 1, noting food needs during the pandemic.

USDA filed a notice in May appealing the order.

Its rule would have limited each state's ability to waive work mandates, effectively requiring more food stamp recipients to work.

The judge added that the rosters of the SNAP program have grown by over 17% in the pandemic's wake, with over 6 million new enrollees as of May.

Nearly 20 percent of americans don't have enough to eat

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/pbrc-n2p092120.php                       

News Release 22-Sep-2020
Pennington Biomedical Research Center

More than 18 percent of U.S. adults do not know whether they will have enough to eat from day to day, and the numbers are worse for Hispanics, Blacks, people with obesity, and women, a new report shows.


•••••

More than a billion school meals not served during pandemic: Study

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/cums-mta091820.php

News Release 18-Sep-2020
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to low or no-cost school breakfast and lunch programs for millions of low-income children. States and school districts developed innovative solutions to meet the nutritional needs of children and respond to the rapidly growing food insecurity crisis, yet the number of replacement meals is likely far short of what they provided prior to the pandemic, according to a study led by a researcher at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The findings are published in the American Journal of Public Health.

•••••

Where Will Everyone Go?

Please read the whole article. It also has good picture.

https://features.propublica.org/climate-migration/model-how-climate-refugees-move-across-continents/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature&fbclid=IwAR3qd8kJUK9JO-L6FHVxZZSglkaGzJxgVpxEkD6-fTlSXs192e6n8t_k-3c

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica Photography by Meridith Kohut for The New York Times Magazine
July 23, 2020

•••••

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83%. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

•••••

For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1% of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing 1 of every 3 people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than 8 million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.

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Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5% of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

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Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5% of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

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If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.

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Most would-be migrants don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil — is an entirely different trial.

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“We can’t stand the hunger,” said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his gaunt face dripping with sweat. At his feet was a gift from a shopkeeper: a plastic bag filled with a cut of raw meat, pooled in its own blood, flies circling around it in the heat. Reyes had nowhere to cook it. “If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die trying to get to the United States.”

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Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper.

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Timing of SNAP benefits can reduce childhood injuries

I wonder if part of this is parents working more hours or temporary jobs to get more money when they are low on food, and thus not being at home to watch over the children?

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/su-tos070220.php


News Release 2-Jul-2020
Syracuse University


A new study published recently in "BMC Pediatrics" shows a connection between the time of the month when low-income families receive their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and the number of emergency room visits due to injuries to children from those families.

Childhood injuries are the leading cause of illness and death in the United States, resulting in an estimated 9.2 million emergency department visits and $17 billion in medical costs annually. For preschoolers, it is the leading cause of disability.

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Families that receive benefits later in the month have fewer ER visits, likely because they can afford to feed their families at the end of the calendar month when other resources run low.

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"Our study suggests that childhood injuries, the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the United States, can be reduced by disbursing SNAP benefits later in the month instead of at the beginning of the calendar month," Heflin said. "Previous work suggests that childhood injuries are associated with parenting practices and child behavior problems, which are also correlated with maternal stress and income.

"Simply put, low-income households may find it harder to avoid childhood injuries while coping with food insecurity," Heflin said. "This work provides one more to a long list of reasons it is important to support federal food assistance programs such as SNAP."

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The researchers said there is no evidence that childhood injuries connected to the timing of SNAP benefits are caused by parents.

"I think that food insecure parents are probably distracted by worrying about how to feed their families and not able to fully focus on their children who may be acting out because they are hungry," Heflin said. "It's more about how many things parents can juggle at one time in a home with food insecurity."

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