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Tag: food

  • ‘As a Human Being, I Beg’: Doctors Say Cease-Fire in Gaza Only Way to Save Countless Lives

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    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Trauma surgeons treat an injured man after Israeli bombardment, at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 21, 2023  (Photo: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)

    Fresh demands for a major increase in humanitarian aid and an end to the bombing came as Gaza’s only cancer hospital shut down due to a lack of fuel.

    As the World Health Organization warns of an “imminent public health catastrophe” in Gaza amid Israeli attacks on medical workers and infrastructure, doctors and other frontline medics said Wednesday that only an immediate cease-fire would give them a fighting chance to save countless lives.

    Responding Wednesday to the shutdown of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only cancer treatment center—due to lack of fuel and damage from Israeli airstrikes, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “no words can describe our concern for the patients who have just lost the only possibility to receive lifesaving cancer treatment or palliative care.”

    Tedros added: “I urge and I plead—for full medical and fuel aid access NOW! The more we wait, the more we put these fragile lives at risk.”

    The WHO chief’s plea came a day after Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based United Nations agency, warned that “an imminent public health catastrophe… looms with the mass displacement, the overcrowding, the damage to water and sanitation infrastructure.”

    Meanwhile, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that “child deaths due to dehydration, particularly infant deaths due to dehydration, are a growing threat.”

    The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called Gaza a “graveyard” for children, more than 3,600 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombardment, with another 1,000 minors reported missing, according to Palestinian and other officials.

    Israeli forces have attacked numerous hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical workers, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and al-Hilu Hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that the bombardment that damaged al-Hilu “endangers the lives of women in the maternity wards and medical staff.”

    According to an “urgent call for protecting healthcare workers in Gaza” published Tuesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, Israeli forces have attacked 57 medical facilities since launching the war on Gaza on October 7, killing 73 workers—including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others—as of October 24. Sixteen of the medical personnel were killed while on duty.

    As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exacts a heavy toll on overwhelmed medical workers and infrastructure in the besieged strip, frontline medics like Dr. Noureddein al-Khateeb—a 38-year-old resident doctor in the emergency department at the Nasser Medical Center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis—say they are living “in a constant state of threat and fear.”

    “It’s constant fear on top of the exhaustion we’re experiencing,” al-Khateeb toldThe New Humanitarian on Wednesday. “But one shouldn’t think of that too much. I can’t. If I do, I won’t get any work done.”

    Al-Khateeb added that “we’re also afraid for our families’ safety, but what can we do?”

    Dr. Mohamed Abu Mousa, a radiologist at Nasser, said one of the few trips he’s made outside the hospital since Israeli bombardment began was to bury his 7-year-old son after he was killed in an October 15 Israeli airstrike on their family home.

    “We don’t have the luxury of pausing to grieve,” he told The New Humanitarian. “The heartache is immense, but the wounded are endless. We have to keep going.”

    Conditions are dire inside Gaza’s hospitals, which are running out of or low on fuel, medicines, equipment, and other essential services and supplies.

    “We’re operating on children without anesthetics,” Léo Cans, who heads the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) mission in Palestine, toldCNN Tuesday. “We don’t have morphine for them.”

    On Wednesday, MSF international president Dr. Christos Christou said in a video published on social media that “we’ve seen and heard the stories of the hell being unleashed on Gaza” as “helpless people are being subjected to horrific bombing” and “families have nowhere to run or hide.”

    Christou continued:

    So many people need help. What medical staff can do is just a drop in the ocean compared to the immense needs. Our teams working in Gaza are exhausted and terrified. Our staff tell us that pregnant women can’t get to hospitals to deliver. People are stuck under the rubble of shelled-out buildings. Children are having limbs amputated while lying on the floor.

    “An immediate cease-fire is the only way the people of Gaza can find safety and the essential aid they urgently need,” Christou asserted. “The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop now… As a human being, I beg—stop the bombing and allow people in Gaza to live.”

    The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that at least 8,796 Palestinians—including nearly 2,300 women and over 3,600 children—have been killed in Israeli attacks, while around 23,000 other people have been injured.

    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common

    Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • Climate change could lead to food-related civil unrest in UK within 50 years, say experts

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    Baby-Spider/Shutterstock

    Sarah Bridle, University of York and Aled Jones, Anglia Ruskin University

    The emptying of supermarket shelves during the COVID pandemic demonstrated the chaos that disruption to the UK’s food supply can provoke. Could this type of disruption have a different cause in the future? And what might the impact on society be?

    These are the questions we sought to answer in our new study, which involved surveying 58 leading UK food experts spanning academia, policy, charitable organisations and business.

    Our findings indicate that food shortages stemming from extreme weather events could potentially lead to civil unrest in the UK within 50 years. Shortages of staple carbohydrates like wheat, bread, pasta and cereal appear to be the most likely triggers of such unrest.

    The UK’s food system appears to be particularly vulnerable to significant disruption. This vulnerability can be attributed, in part, to its emphasis on efficiency at the expense of resilience (the ability to withstand and recover from shocks). This approach includes a heavy reliance on seasonal labour and practices like “just-in-time” supply chains, where products are delivered precisely when needed.

    Our study emphasises the importance of developing plans to help the UK prepare for, and respond to, the risks associated with food shortages in the future.

    Out of Stock sign on a supermarket shelf.
    Customers emptied supermarket shelves in a panic during the COVID pandemic.
    Kauka Jarvi/Shutterstock

    Expert survey

    We asked food experts to rate the likelihood of a scenario occurring in the UK in which more than 30,000 people suffered violent injury over the course of one year through events such as demonstrations or violent looting.

    Just over 40% of these experts said they thought such a scenario was either “possible” or “more likely than not” in the next ten years. Over 50 years, nearly 80% of experts believed civil unrest was either possible, more likely than not, or “very likely”.

    The experts were then asked about the potential causes of food system disruption that would lead to unrest. They were asked whether they thought this disruption would stem from an overall scarcity of food, or from issues related to food distribution, which could prevent food from reaching the right places and thus create isolated pockets of hunger.

    Our results show that most experts (80%) hold the belief that, within the next ten years, logistical distribution issues leading to shortages are the most probable cause of food-related civil unrest.

    However, when contemplating a 50-year timeframe, the majority (57%) said an insufficient food supply to sustain the UK population would be the most likely cause, potentially due to events such as a catastrophic harvest failure.

    Extreme weather – including storm surges, flooding, snow and drought – was chosen as the leading cause of future food supply shortages and distribution issues over both the ten- and 50-year time frames.

    UK already at risk

    Just under half of the UK’s entire food supply is imported, including 80% of fruit, 50% of vegetables, and 20% of beef and poultry. Any disruption to imports and supply chains can thus have a significant impact on food availability in the UK. A fall in the availability of food can lead to rising prices and, potentially, social unrest.

    COVID, Brexit and the cost of living crisis have highlighted the UK’s vulnerability to such a risk. Between April and August 2022, as inflation squeezed household incomes, over half of independent food banks in the UK reported that 25% or more of the people they supported hadn’t used their services before.

    Extreme weather events are also occurring more frequently. Many of these events are driven by climate change. It’s entirely possible that extreme weather will cause major crop yield failures across “multiple breadbaskets” in the coming decades.

    This scenario is not far-fetched. We have witnessed numerous instances of major shocks to food production in recent decades.

    One notable example, in 2007, saw an 8% decline in global cereal production due to droughts, floods and heatwaves in Australia, India and the US. These events, combined with low global cereal stocks, financial speculation and high fertiliser prices, resulted in cereal prices more than doubling. The crisis sparked food riots in more than 30 countries.

    To reduce the risk of civil unrest occurring in the UK as a result of food shortages, it’s crucial to address food poverty. By ensuring people can access and afford the food that is available, trust can be built between communities, government and food supply chains over time.

    A field baked by drought.
    A scenario where crops fail catastrophically is not far-fetched, say food experts.
    Piyaset/Shutterstock

    Redesigning the food system

    The UK needs a food system designed not just for optimal efficiency, but also for resilience. Government agencies and businesses must explore and fund options to make the food system more robust to shocks.

    This should include restoring degraded soils and the habitats used by pollinators, improving working conditions within the food supply chain, and prioritising sustainable farming practices.

    Growing more robust crop varieties and species, using resources more efficiently, and establishing backup storage and distribution systems to move away from just-in-time delivery are all key aspects of a more resilient food system too.

    Efforts to curb the harmful effects of climate change – the most probable cause of future food shortages and distribution issues – should also be ramped up.

    The COVID pandemic saw major challenges with food distribution, from which lessons can be learned. Creating a food system that is both resilient and efficient will safeguard against future disruptions, ensuring that food is accessible and affordable while preventing the emergence of civil unrest.

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    Sarah Bridle, Professor of Food, Climate and Society, University of York and Aled Jones, Professor & Director, Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • Climate extremes like this summer’s heatwaves threaten UK food imports from Mediterranean

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    Cerberus heatwave Europe 2023
    © contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA / Heatwave across Europe / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO CC BY-SA IGO (Ausschnitt)

    Analysis of extent of UK food imports from Mediterranean region show scale of threat which increasingly severe climate impacts pose to UK food security.

    With parts of Europe and north Africa suffering extreme high temperatures and wildfires, analysis of the extent of UK food imports from the Mediterranean region show the scale of threat which increasingly severe climate impacts pose to UK food security.

    The report, by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows that in 2022, just over a quarter of UK food imports – 9.8 billion kilograms, worth just over £16 billion – came from the Mediterranean region, most of which was staple fresh produce like fruit and vegetables. Spain alone, which is experiencing some of the worst climate impacts in the region, accounted for 7% of our food imports – worth £4 billion.

    Europe has warmed at twice the rate of the global average over the last three decades, with the nations in southern Europe and northern Africa, around the Mediterranean experiencing some of the worst heat extremes ever in the last few years.

    This has caused harm to food production as water shortages, extreme heat and fire damage crops, reduce quality and lower yields. Reduced yields mean less food in our shops and markets, and higher prices for the commodities affected. Previous ECIU analysis found that climate change and fossil fuel prices added more than £400 to household shopping bills in 2022, increasing the total annual UK food shopping bill by around £11.4 billion.