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Experts on invertebrates have expressed “profound shock” over a government report showing a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s.

The tiny animals are an important food for fish, mammals and crustaceans.

Figures contained in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) document, Marine Programme Plan, suggested a fall in abundance.

Charity Buglife said it could be a “biodiversity disaster of enormous proportions”.

They said it could have implications for creatures all the way up the food chain, from sand eels to the seabirds, such as puffin, which feed on the fish.

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THARPARKAR, Pakistan: When Pakistani labourer Mangal Ram’s children cry from hunger all he has to offer them is empty promises.

“My kids complain and cry for more food but what can I do?,” said Ram, 50, a father of seven who lives in the desert village of Tharparkar, in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh.

“We say ‘wait, we’ll cook more’, what else can we do?” he asks with a shrug.

Ram’s anguish is becoming increasingly common in Pakistan where inflation is running at about 20 percent, led by fuel and food prices.

Soaring food prices and shortages of staples mean about 77 million people of Pakistan’s 160 million population are food insecure, a 28 percent increase over the past year, according to U.N. World Food Program (WFP) estimates.

The term food insecure means people are unable to get sufficient nutritious food to meet dietary needs.

While there have not been serious food protests in Pakistan, analysts say there is a danger anger could explode in a society that has already fallen prey to Islamist militants bent on bringing down the government.

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An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven’t gone that far in their estimates.

With soaring food prices high on the agenda for next week’s G-8 Summit in Japan, World Bank President Robert Zoellick has been clear that action needs to be taken. “What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm,” he wrote in a Tuesday letter to major Western leaders. “It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.”

According to a confidential World Bank report leaked to the Guardian on Thursday, Zoellick’s organization may have a pretty good idea what that fix might look like: stop producing biofuels.

The report claims that biofuels have driven up global food prices by 75 percent, according to the Guardian report, accounting for more than half of the 140 percent jump in price since 2002 of the food examined by the study. The paper claims that the report, completed in April, was not made public in order to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush.

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R.,

A few more thoughts along the same lines I talked about previously.

All of humanity’s history has been a series of incremental advances along multiple paths; business, social organization, military, agriculture, technological, etc. In all of this, the thought has primarily been to advance, empower and grow.

Now, for the first time in humanity’s history, we have filled the planet and have begun to hit various unyielding limits; water, food, oil, pollution, as well as limits having to do with how much impact we can have on the biosphere without causing huge shifts in the demographics of various species and even causing their extinctions.

It is clear, if humanity wants to continue to live indefinitely on this planet, that we are going to have to shift from a growth and advance strategy in all we do to one predicated on establishing a steady-state and sustainable balance with the biosphere around us.

We cannot use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. We cannot occupy more of the planet’s surface than is consistent with allowing the rest of the planet’s biology to exist and flourish. These both imply that our population has to come down to some sustainable number and be held there. We have to come up with ways to govern ourselves that are consistent with establishing and maintaining these essential balances. Nation against nation, system against system is not compatible with long term survival. The ultimate goal and purpose of government in an enlightened world should be to secure all of our futures (we and all the rest of the planet’s biology) and maintain the balance.

We could, if we cut our population to sustainable levels and learned to live within a sustainable footprint on this planet, exist here for tens of thousands of years and maintain a decent quality of life for all those who are alive at any specific point in time. We do not have to give up comfort or technology - we just have to dial our impact on the planet back to sustainable levels and stay with in those levels.

Anything that the Gates Foundation or any other forward looking organization works on that does not include long term goals like these is likely in the big picture to just be a shuffling of our problems from one place to the other rather than a real indefinite-term planet-wide solution to how our species is going to solve the problem of learning to live here without fouling our nest for ourselves and all the other species that depend on this planet’s biosphere.

A long-running drought in Australia’s main food-growing region, the Murray-Darling river basin, has worsened, a new report says.

Three months of dry weather and the driest June on record have plunged the area back into drought, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission says.

Crossing much of south-east Australia, the Murray-Darling is the country’s most important river system.

The basin produces 40% of Australia’s fruit, vegetables and grain.

Experts say the drought will hit irrigated crops like rice and grapes the hardest, because other crops, such as wheat, depend more on rainfall during specific periods.

Grim picture

Corey Watts, of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Melbourne, told the BBC that drought was becoming a regular occurrence instead of happening once every 20 to 25 years.

“We’ve had a string of reports, official reports, over the last fortnight painting a pretty grim picture for the climate and the future of our economy and our environment,” he said. “So now we’re looking at a future in the next few decades where drought will occur once every two years.”

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The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says.

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.

Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020.

Oxfam estimates the EU’s target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.

The report’s author, Oxfam’s biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, criticised rich countries for using subsidies and tax breaks to encourage the use of food crops for alternative sources of energy like ethanol.

“If the fuel value for a crop exceeds its food value, then it will be used for fuel instead,” he said.

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JALANDHAR, India — With the right technology and policies, India could help feed the world. Instead, it can barely feed itself.

India’s supply of arable land is second only to that of the United States, its economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and its industrial innovation is legendary. But when it comes to agriculture, its output lags far behind potential. For some staples, India must turn to already stretched international markets, exacerbating a global food crisis.

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- Research thanks to Rolf A. 

- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

This worrisome research article has appeared in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not telling us anything that we didn’t already know, but it does catalogue the situation and help us steer clear of the hyperbole.

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed ’sceptics’ claim to be unbiased analysts combating ‘junk science’. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

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More than 60 per cent of Australia’s main eastern agricultural state of New South Wales has slid back into drought after a dramatic increase in dry conditions in the past month, the state Government says.

Over the past month, drought grew to cover 62.7 per cent of the state, from 48.4 per cent a month earlier.

“Much of the cropping belt [is] on a knife edge waiting for desperately needed rain,” said the state Minister for Primary Industries, Ian Macdonald.

“All cropping areas are in urgent need of good rainfall to consolidate crops that have been sown and enable remaining seed to be planted.”

Areas that have slipped back into drought include key wheat growing areas in the central western parts of the state as well as the northern slopes and southern areas.

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GRIFFIN, Ind. — In a year when global harvests need to be excellent to ease the threat of pervasive food shortages, evidence is mounting that they will be average at best. Some farmers are starting to fear disaster.

American corn and soybean farmers are suffering from too much rain, while Australian wheat farmers have been plagued by drought.

“The planting has gotten off to a poor start,” said Bill Nelson, a Wachovia grains analyst. “The anxiety level is increasing.”

Randy Kron, whose family has been farming in the southwestern corner of Indiana for 135 years, should have corn more than a foot tall by now. But all spring it has seemed as if there were a faucet in the sky. The rain is regular, remorseless.

Some of Mr. Kron’s fields are too soggy to plant. Some of the corn he managed to get in has drowned, forcing him to replant. The seeds that survived are barely two inches high.

At a moment when the country’s corn should be flourishing, one plant in 10 has not even emerged from the ground, the Agriculture Department said Monday. Because corn planted late is more sensitive to heat damage in high summer, every day’s delay practically guarantees a lower yield at harvest.

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- Hat tip to Survival Acres for this story

- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.