Taking lessons from the Fukushima nuclear incident in March 2011, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will review standard evacuation procedures in the event of a threat to a US nuclear plant, an NRC official said at a think tank event Thursday (March 22nd). Although current NRC standards require a 10-mile evacuation buffer and […]
Just as the food crisis and famine in the Horn of Africa becomes manageable for aid groups, another crisis begins on the other side of the continent in the Sahel region of West Africa. On the edges of the Sahara Desert, drought is not uncommon, but is becoming more frequent with major food emergencies in […]
Tochigi became the fourth prefecture to have beef shipments suspended due to fears of radiation contamination. Tochigi joins Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi to find cattle contaminated with radioactive cesium after eating straw grown near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The straw was contaminated with 690,000 becquerels per kilogram, well over the government’s limit of […]
Last week the UN declared a famine in two regions of Southern Somalia and warned that it could spread to other parts of the Horn of Africa. That is a big deal. As Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch pointed out, a famine is a technical finding based or mortality, malnutrition and water consumption; they […]
Two weeks ago the European Union announced that it intends to provide $14.5 million in emergency food aid to North Korea. According to the statement released by the EU, after visiting North Korea in June, monitors judged the situation to be: “Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including […]
There was a very important bit of reporting in the NY Times yesterday: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself. Among the most important things it does is illustrate quite clearly how the extremes of temperature and precipitation that are becoming the norm are negatively affecting agricultural production. Productivity losses generate higher prices which, in […]
At the start of every year, we celebrate and wonder what the next 365 days will bring. We know that there will be ups and downs, things we didn’t expect, public scandals we never anticipated, tragedies of some sort that will unfold on our television sets, and a whole lot of everyday distractions in between. […]