Famine

The millions of people in Niger who died during the recent famines, did so because the IMF pressured its government to tax food and the poor simply couldn't afford to save themselves

It’s 2008, and feeding ourselves has never been easier. We take for granted a supply of every agricultural commodity on the planet, 365 days a year. Food is cheap. Never in living memory have we spent less on it as a proportion of our total expenditure. Even our poorest citizens can afford the luxury foods of yesteryear, like salmon and chicken.

As water shortages, and water prices, rocket farmers are leaving fields fallow to sell the irrigation water to cities where it is illegal for restaurants to give customers water unless they ask for it.

As the bluetongue virus sinks its teeth into British livestock, there is one appalling certainty: like the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and foot-and-mouth before it, some farmers will see no way out, and take their own lives. Farmers in Britain are the profession second most likely to commit suicide (after, bizarrely, dentistry).

Two critical markets are pursuing a stressed planet’s renewable resources, presenting policymakers with complex and difficult choices. The Worldwatch Institute’s latest look at Earth’s “vital signs” sees dangerous times ahead as the “sustainability crisis” unfolds. China Dialogue's Maryann Bird investigates

We didn’t want GM on your table, but the crucial question now is, will we allow it in our tanks? Robin Maynard and Pat Thomas report

Sir Nicholas Stern was asked to find out what way of averting climate change was economically feasible. A loaded question that has allowed him to find a perverse solution to a fatal problem.

David Nicholson-Lord explains why trying to discuss human population growth these days is like placing your head on a stand at a coconut shy

In August 2006, German chemicals company BASF applied to start GM potato field trials
in Cambridge and Derbyshire as early as next spring. The GM industry is making many
claims about this product, but are these based on the truth? Andy Rees investigates

By radically changing the way we acquire our food, the development of agriculture has condemned us to live worse than ever before. Not only that, agriculture has led to the first significant instances of large-scale war, inequality, poverty, crime, famine and human induced climate change and mass extinction.
By Clive W. Dennis (winner of the Ecologist/Coady International Institute 2006 Essay Competition)

Anyone serious about making poverty history needs to understand where poverty actually comes from and what it really is.

Ros Coward reports from Murcia in southern Spain, the driest place in Europe, where tourism and intensive agriculture is draining its meagre water supplies and causing a growing environmental crisis.

Today, while hunger stunts the lives of hundreds of millions of people, grassroots movements in Kenya and Brazil are winning the war on want. Frances Moore Lappé investigates