The Stream, August 5: Food Aid for Africa

Support for farmers in Africa dried up long before Somalia’s famine, The Atlantic argues, when international donors walked away from long-term agricultural-development efforts in the continent.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos said the famine in two areas of southern Somalia could spread throughout the region unless the humanitarian response grows soon.

The Guardian explains how humanitarian aid is reaching Somalia and how operations to get aid into the country have been hit by a lack of cash in the build-up to the famine.

Villagers in Kenya’s Tana Delta are forced to fight for their plots of land as the government is forcing landowners out to make way for water-thirsty sugar-cane and jatropha plantations for biofuels production, the Guardian reported.

Yale Environment 360 reports on the attempts to drill for shale gas in South Africa’s semi-desert Karoo region.

The rest of the world is ahead of the United States in developing renewable energy technologies and building a low-carbon economy, according to Foreign Policy’s Charles Kenny.

Shouguang, China’s “vegetable basket,” is drenched in pesticides, China Wire reported. Like much of China’s arable land, the area’s groundwater is polluted, the soil is hardening and output is declining. Is China running short of fertile land?

Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, talks about California’s water challenges, the global freshwater crisis and the need to rethink sustainability.

Greece plans to raise the sales tax on bottled water to 23 percent from 13 percent, Bloomberg reported, citing the Kathimerini newspaper. Sales of bottled water dropped as much as 20 percent this year after the value-added tax was raised to 13 percent from 9 percent.

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