BURUNDI: Thousands flee food crisis in north
Source: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82390
BUJUMBURA, 15 January 2009 (IRIN) - The food crisis looming in the northern province of Kirundo has prompted more than 1,000 families to flee their homes in search of food in neighbouring countries, officials say.
The governor of Kirundo, Juvenal Muvunyi, told IRIN on 15 January that 1,375 families had fled to neighbouring Rwanda or Tanzania in search of food. “In Busoni, 307 families have fled their homes in Gatare, 167 in Gisenyi zone, 15 in Nyagisozi, three in Murore and 17 in Mukerwa,” Muvunyi said.
Other communes of Kirundo affected by the food crisis include Bugabira, where 340 families were registered and to a lesser extent Gitobe, with 276, and 250 in Kirundo commune.
Kirundo province, once considered Burundi’s food basket, is facing recurrent food shortages because of poor rains. “The problem lies in the consistency of the soil. If there is no rain for only two weeks, the soil is completely dry and the harvest lost,” Muvunyi said.
Pierre Sinzobatohana, general manager in charge of mobilisation for self-reliance and agricultural popularisation in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, said the first rains started falling in Busoni, Bugabira and parts of Kirundo commune only on 12 December when the rainy season normally begins in September.
“In response to reports of a food crisis affecting the Bugesera region, notably at Kirundo, the World Food Programme [WFP] sent a mission last week for a first emergency assessment of the food needs at Kirundo,” Rickie-Nelly Ndagano, public information officer at WFP in Bujumbura, said.
“The first emergency relief aid will be distributed throughout next week to a targeted group of 16,400 households, approximately 90,000 persons,” she added.
Another joint mission comprising WFP, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is in Kirundo to devise a short- and long-term response to the recurring food crisis in the region.
The provincial administration officials are also planning to distribute beans and maize flour contributed by the government. Muvunyi appealed to the population to stay put as the situation was not as alarming as in 2003.
Sinzobatohana said: “All the partners to the ministry of agriculture should encourage residents of Kirundo to start digging and prepare for the next planting season.”
Shortages in the east
Food shortages were also reported in the eastern Ruyigi province, with the local media saying some 8,000 people had fled to Tanzania in search of food. However, local administration officials played down the food crisis, saying only dozens of people were leaving the province to seek jobs in Tanzania.
Pontien Hatungimana, a Ruyigi official, admitted however that poor rainfall in some areas and heavy rains in others had resulted in a poor yield. Hatungimana said 34 percent of the population in Kinyinya commune, estimated at 12,000 households, were affected by the food shortage. “All the crops of beans and maize were completely lost,” he said.
However, he stressed there was cause for hope as the peanut and maize crops were on the verge of being harvested. He appealed to humanitarian agencies to supply seeds to the Ruyigi population to prepare for the next planting season.
jb/mw
BURKINA FASO: Authorities fear renewed violence if cereal prices remain high
Source: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82395
OUAGADOUGOU, 15 January 2009 (IRIN) - Burkina Faso’s trade minister has warned cereal producers the country may face violent street demonstrations again if cereal prices do not fall.
In early 2008 Burkina Faso was rocked by street protests after food and basic goods prices increased by more than half.
Despite a 2008 surplus cereal production of 700,000 tons – in part due to government subsidies implemented after the price riots – in January 2009 the price for a 100kg-bag of locally-produced corn increased by 20 percent in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, according to the non-profit Afrique Verte.
“Consumers are very sensitive to high prices because most of them consume local cereals,” said Minister of Trade Mamadou Sanou.
He and the Minister of Agriculture, Laurent Sedogo, met with cereal merchants and producers on 14 January to discuss how to bring down cereal prices after steep increases in December and January.
According to Afrique Verte, which monitors regional cereal costs, in December and January price increases in Burkina Faso reached unprecedented levels of 20 percent for corn and 14 percent for millet and sorghum.
“If these prices do not come down, we are going to have a repeat of the social unrest from 2008. This is not good for the country, so we need to safeguard peace,” Sanou warned producers.
Higher demand
Local cereal merchants and farmers’ associations said buyers from neighbouring countries who poured in at the end of the 2008 harvest have driven up demand – and prices.
The price of a 100kg-bag of corn crept up from US$15 in November 2008 to its current January price of $32, according to Moussa Dagano, a farmer from Sissili in western Burkina Faso.
“The Ghanaians buy at higher prices and since the demand is high, farmers hold on to their products to get better prices,” Dagano explained.
Another reason surplus production has not brought down prices is because farmers and local private businessmen are withholding cereal to rebuild their stocks, which have plummeted to their lowest levels in a decade, according to both producers and the government.
Agriculture Minister Sedogo said fluctuating rainfall levels caused by climate change are to blame for poor harvests in prior years and the near-depletion of cereal stocks.
''...Free the stocks and feed the populations...''
He appealed to farmers: “Free the stocks and feed the populations.”
“I can assure you the government is going to renew last year’s subsidies, and even improve them,” Sedogo told the farmers. Following the price riots, the government authorised emergency subsidies worth almost $28 million for fertilisers, seeds and farming equipment.
When asked if the government would force a cereal price reduction, Trade Minister Sanou said the government is “avoid[ing] strong-arm tactics”, choosing instead to “encourage farmers to produce, and to support them so they will act in the best interests of the country.”
bo/pt/aj
Push to help millions displaced by global warming.
The number could reach a billion by 2050.
A concerted effort is underway at the Coppenhagen climate summit to addess the socioeconomic needs of climate refugees whose numbers are variously estimated at tens of million and exepected to reach a billion by 2050. Even though the needs of current and future evnvironmental refugees remain basic - food, shelter, social services, and health care , representatives of the Less Developed Counties (LDC) find themselves unable to have their voices heard, and pushing hard to obtain written commitments and fund allocations to address current and future needs of the refugees.
1 - GLOBAL: Good news for climate change migrants
http://www.irinnews.org/copyright.aspx
COPENHAGEN, 11 December (IRIN) - After months of negotiations, the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen have good news for countries that might see hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of people migrating or being displaced by climate change.
For the first time the text dealing exclusively with adaptation to climate change - one of several tracks up for negotiation - has included a substantive
paragraph on the need to consider planned relocation for people displaced by climate change, with "interstate cooperation" to respond to their needs.
The text has yet to be adopted, but this paragraph had "no opposition from all the countries, and is most likely to go through," said Bruno Sekoli, chair of
the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group at the talks.
Koko Warner, head of the Environmental Migration, Social Vulnerability and Adaptation Section at the UN University, described the inclusion as "very
significant". She and other academics and aid agencies have been lobbying and working with countries at the talks for the recognition of migration and
displacement as part of adaptation action.
The term "climate refugees" was first mentioned in the adaptation text at talks in Bonn, Germany, in June. The term has been dropped, but the need to help
people who "either cross an international border as a result of, or find themselves abroad and are unable to return owing to, the effects of climate
change" has gained prominence.
There was widespread consensus that the current legal definition of a refugee should not be tampered with to accommodate those affected by environmental
factors, and researchers agreed that most countries would accept a new concept and a separate convention on people displaced by environmental changes.
Mizan Khan, a member of the Bangladesh delegation and part of the team working on migration in the adaptation text, said he was certain the issue would be
endorsed by all countries, which would set in motion the process of considering an international legal framework for the status of people displaced by climate
change.
"We are considering the term 'climate change-induced displacees'," said Khan, who teaches environmental science at the North South University in Bangladesh.
Among the other immediate steps taken should be setting up an international financing mechanism to fund the relocation of internally displaced people, and
beginning a process to consider the status of countries such as Maldives, a group of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, whose entire population might
have to be relocated because of the rising sea level.
Global meetings were marked by emotional appeals from island states, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, which could become largely uninhabitable by a one-metre
rise in sea level. The Maldives has played a leading role in creating awareness of the issue for the past two decades.
The debate on "climate refugees" has been controversial because of the sheer numbers of people likely to be affected, but the UN University's Warner said
research organizations and humanitarian agencies emphasized that most of the migration and displacement caused by climate change would be internal.
As the impact of climate change intensifies, estimates of the number of people displaced by natural disasters or rising sea levels have grown from 50 million
in 2010, to hundreds of millions or even one billion by 2050.
"Forced movements, both internal and transboundary, can partially be prevented by timely and adequate adaptation, including disaster risk reduction measures,"
Warner said. "This needs to be combined with measures to better manage and increase the positive impact of voluntary population movements."
The considerable attention to the issue in Copenhagen follows the African Union's recognition in an international agreement, the Kampala Convention, that
natural disasters as well as conflict and generalized violence were key factors in uprooting people.
In 2008 climate-related natural disasters like droughts, hurricanes and floods forced 20 million people out of their homes, while 4.6 million people were
internally displaced by conflicts, according to a recent joint study by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Geneva-based
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
Population GEOGRAPHY Geog. 496
Women are taking the lead in the fight against global warming:
No one is talking about the possible impacts of climate change on the lives of women in Less Developed Countries. The impact would include additional work for women already overburdoned by family responsibilites - raising children, cooking, farming, trips to the martket to obtain essential goods, etc. Climate change could add numerous new responsibilities such as caring for many more sick persons, building of terraces to limit the impacts of floods, greater involvement in soil conservation activites, etc.
Bangladeshis rally against climate change
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hIxbJKhXH3Y3bjL1VC1bgZMH1lgAD94NBTMG2
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Some 500 women rallied in Bangladesh's capital on Thursday, demanding richer nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions and compensate the impoverished countries that experts believe will be hardest hit by the impacts of climate change.
The women, mostly rural poor, wore masks mocking leaders from wealthy nations such as France, Britain and the United States, and marched through Dhaka University's campus carrying banners that read "Cut emissions, save poor nations" and "Stop harming, start helping."
Organizers from the Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihood, an Oxfam-funded network of domestic labor and rights groups, said the rally was timed to send a message to delegates who will gather Dec. 1 in Poznan, Poland for a United Nations conference on climate change.
"We are here with a message that we are suffering, and our sufferings will increase manifold if rich countries do not act aggressively," said Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, a Bangladeshi expert on climate change.
"Rich nations like the U.S. and emerging countries such as China and India must act properly," he said. "We need development but not at the cost of our future."
Bangladesh, a densely populated nation of 150 million people, suffers annual floods, frequent cyclones and increasing salinity in its coastal regions.
Experts say more frequent flooding due to global warming could eventually put as much as one-third of Bangladesh's land mass permanently under water.
Your neighborhood could be making you sick:
A new study invetigating the possible impacts of proximity of residence to major freeways confirmed the detrimental health impacts such a location might have. The study reveiewed tens of available literature on the subject to assess the link between location and health risks.
Potential health effects associated with residential proximity to freeways and primary roads: review of scientific literature, 1999-2006
:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6679/is_8_70/ai_n29426759/pg_3
Three studies examined the relationship between adverse birth outcomes and traffic exposure and reported statistically significant associations... Maternal residence within 500 m of a major freeway in Taiwan was reported to be a significant risk factor for preterm birth.....Wilhelm and Ritz (2003) reported that California mothers who lived within 750 ft (229 m) of the highest quintile of heavy-traffic roadways during pregnancy were more likely to have a preterm baby. These researchers reported higher risks of preterm and low-birth-weight babies being born in the fall and winter to mothers living nearer the highest-quintile traffic density. An extended analysis of these California births by Ponce and co-authors (2005) further confirmed the association between proximity to dense traffic and low birth weight for births occurring in the winter.
Mortality Risks
Three studies examined the relationship between residential proximity to traffic and mortality. Associations were reported for cardiopulmonary, stroke, and cardiovascular mortality in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Canada (Finkelstein, 2000; Maheswaran & Elliot, 2003; Hoek, Brunekreef, Goldbohm, Fischer, & van den Brandt, 2002). Both Finkelstein (2000) and Hoek and co-authors (2002) reported statistically significant mortality risks for residences within 100 m of a highway (freeway) and 50 m of an urban road. Maheswaran and Elliot (2003) reported elevated mortality risks at a distance of up to 1000 m from the centroid of the residential enumeration district. These findings were consistent with those of previous studies establishing PM as a well-defined risk factor for premature mortality; more than 50 percent of total PM emissions in urban areas of industrialized countries have been estimated to come from traffic (Wrobel, Rokita, & Maenhaut, 2000; Briggs et al., 1997).
Discussion and Policy Implications
Of the 29 studies reviewed, 25 reported statistically significant associations between residential proximity to traffic and at least one of the following adverse health effects: increased prevalence and severity of symptoms of asthma and other respiratory diseases; diminished lung function; adverse birth outcomes; childhood cancer; and increased mortality risks. These associations were reported across a broad range of exposure metrics ranging from self-report to sophisticated mobile-source models, a wide variety of analytical designs controlling for diverse confounders, and diverse geographical locations. The results were particularly consistent for 9 of 10 non-respiratory studies reporting statistically significant associations between residential proximity to traffic and childhood cancer; adverse birth outcomes; and cardiopulmonary, cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and stroke mortality.
Mixed findings from studies of respiratory outcomes and residential proximity to traffic may be partly explained by issues related to case identification and definitions used for asthma diagnosis. First, asthma prevalence and respiratory symptoms in many of the studies were self-reported through surveys and were subject to recall bias (Garshick et al., 2003; Gauderman et al., 2005; Heinrich et al., 2005; Janssen et al., 2003; Lewis et al., 2004; McConnell et al., 2006; Schikowski et al., 2005;Venn et al., 2001; Venn et al., 2005). Obtaining accurate reporting of symptoms by young children is especially challenging because they may not be aware of or capable of verbalizing symptoms, or may not be able to recall symptoms as well as older children or adults (Kuehni & Frey 2002). Second, studies have demonstrated that parental conceptual understanding of wheeze varies across ethnic groups (Cane, Pao, & McKenzie, 2001) and differs from definitions used by epidemiologists (Cane, Ranganathan, & McKenzie, 2000). Third, even a physician's diagnosis of asthma can be unreliable because of changes in diagnostic practices and definitions over time (Hill, Williams, Tattersfield, & Britton 1989).
Climate Change, Food, the Globalized World, and Demograpy.
The world is now one small village. Long gone are the years when a catastrophe in one corner of the world would have impacts that are highly localized and unlikely to affect anyone outside of national borders. Here is another article from New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/worldbusiness/17warm.html?ref=todayspaper
DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.
The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.
The drought’s effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production.
It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to long-term climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.
Indeed, the chief executive of the National Farmers’ Federation in Australia, Ben Fargher, says, “Climate change is potentially the biggest risk to Australian agriculture.”
Drought has already spurred significant changes in Australia’s agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold fields or water rights, usually to grape growers.
Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water resources — away from rice and other grains and toward more lucrative crops and livestock — threatens poor countries that import rice as a dietary staple.
The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become political, pitting the United States and other developed countries against the developing world over the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples. The World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called on major agricultural nations to overhaul policies to avoid a social explosion from rising food prices.
With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability. Even in normal times, little of the world’s rice is actually exported — more than 90 percent is consumed in the countries where it is grown. In the last quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global reserves plunging by half just since 2000. A plant disease is hurting harvests in Vietnam, reducing supply. And economic uncertainty has led producers to hoard rice and speculators and investors to see it as a lucrative or at least safe bet.
All these factors have made countries that buy rice on the global market vulnerable to extreme price swings.
Senegal and Haiti each import four-fifths of their rice, and both have faced mounting unrest as prices have increased. Police suppressed violent demonstrations in Dakar on March 30, and unrest has spread to other rice-dependent nations in West Africa, notably Ivory Coast. The Haitian president, René Préval, after a week of riots, announced subsidies for rice buyers on Saturday.
Scientists expect the problem to worsen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations, predicted last year that even slight warming would lower agricultural output in the tropics and subtropics.
Moderate warming could benefit crop and pasture yields in countries far from the Equator, like Canada and Russia. In fact, the net effect of moderate warming is likely to be higher total global food production in the next several decades.
But the scientists said the effect would be uneven, and enormous quantities of food would need to be shipped from areas farther from the Equator to feed the populations of often less-affluent countries closer to the Equator.
The panel predicted that even greater warming, which might happen by late in this century if few or no limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions, would hurt total food output and cripple crops in many countries.
Paul Lamine N’Dong, an elder in Joal, Senegal, worries that hot weather and failing rains have already crippled his village’s crop of millet, a coarse grain eaten locally and traded for rice.
Sitting on a concrete dais reserved for elders, Mr. N’Dong said on a recent morning, “The price rises very quickly, which means we really have to go and look for money.”
“It is live or die,” he said.
For farmers in a richer nation like Australia, the effects of the current drought are already significant.
The rice farmers who do not give up and sell their land or water rights are experimenting with varieties or techniques that require less water.
Still, Australia’s total rice capacity has declined by about a third because many farmers have permanently sold water rights, mostly for grape production. And production last year was far lower because of a severe shortage of water; rice farmers received one-eighth of the water they are usually promised by the government.
The accidental beneficiaries of these conditions have been the farmers who grow wine grapes in the river basin where the Deniliquin mill stands silent.
Even with the recent doubling of rice prices, to around $1,000 a metric ton for the high grades produced by Australia, it is even more profitable to grow wine grapes. All told, wine grapes produce a pretax profit of close to $2,000 an acre while rice produces a pretax profit around $240 an acre.
Also selling water rights to grape growers are ranchers like Peter Milliken, who raises sheep on 37,500 acres near Hay, Australia. Some ranchers have water to sell because they are reducing the water they use. Mr. Milliken is installing a buried nine-mile pipe to replace an irrigation canal that lost up to 90 percent of its water to evaporation — and is planning for the day when he does not irrigate at all.
Sheep farmers have already worked out cooperative arrangements to send flocks to whatever fields have recently received rain, sometimes herding or trucking them long distances. Keeping an eye on a flock, Frank Cox, a drover, said recently, “We had to move the sheep because they were dying of starvation, and truck them down here.”
The drought is making rice harder to find. For instance, SunRice, the Australian rice trading and marketing giant owned by the country’s rice growers, began preparing to mothball the Deniliquin mill five months ago, when it noticed that Australian farmers were planting almost no rice. To make sure that it could continue supplying the domestic market, as well as export markets in Papua New Guinea, South Pacific island nations, Taiwan and the Middle East, SunRice stepped up rice purchases from other countries, said the chief executive, Gary Helou.
The SunRice purchases became one among the many factors that are making it harder for longtime rice importers elsewhere to find supplies.
Researchers are looking for solutions to global rice shortages — for example, rice that blooms earlier in the day, when it is cooler, to counter global warming. Rice plants that happen to bloom on hot days are less likely to produce grains of rice, a difficulty that is already starting to emerge in inland areas of China and other Asian countries as temperatures begin to climb.
“There will be problems very soon unless we have new varieties of rice in place,” said Reiner Wassmann, climate change coordinator at the International Rice Research Institute near Manila, a leader in developing higher-yielding strains of rice for nearly half a century.
The recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried an important caveat that could make the news even worse: the panel said that existing models for the effects of climate change on agriculture did not yet include newer findings that global warming could reduce rainfall and make it more variable.
Seeking Hardier Rice
Many agronomists contend that changes in the timing and amount of rain are more important for crops than temperature changes. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said long-range climate forecasts for precipitation would require another 5 to 20 years of research.
In addition to drought, climate change could also produce more extreme weather, more pest and weed outbreaks, and changes in sea level as polar ice melts. Most of the world’s increase in rice production over the last quarter-century has occurred close to sea level, in the deltas of rivers like the Mekong in Vietnam, Chao Phraya in Thailand and Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh.
Yet the effects of climate change are not uniformly bad for rice. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, can actually help rice and other crops — although the effect dwindles or disappears if the plants face excessive heat, inadequate water, severe pollution or other stresses.
Still, the flexibility of farmers and ranchers here has persuaded some climate experts that, particularly in developed countries, the effects of climate change may be mitigated, if not completely avoided.
“I’m not as pessimistic as most people,” said Will Steffen, the director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University. “Farmers are learning how to do things differently.”
Meanwhile, changes like the use of water to grow wine grapes instead of rice carry their own costs, as the developing world is discovering.
“Rice is a staple food,” said Graeme J. Haley, the general manager of the town of Deniliquin. “Chardonnay is not.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/worldbusiness/17warm.html?ref=todayspaper
"It is a girl" ! Where are all the boys? Is pollution changing sex ratios at birth? Visit the website below for an audio report on the alarming statistics on sex ratio at birth (normally 100 girls per every 104 boys). Among Eskimo villagers in Northern Greenland the ratio is 200 girls per 100 boys.
Arctic Gender Imbalance – Eskimo villages in Northern Greenland are seeing few or no baby boys being born. Scientists say organic pollutants like PCBs in seal and whale meat might be skewing the area's sex ratios.
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=08-P13-00030&segmentID=1
More women are having fewer children, if at all, AP
Immigration has long sustained the relatively high (compared to Europe) population growth in America. Countering the potential future population gain from immigration is an ongoing trend of fewer births among the current generation of American mothers compared to their own mothers and grandmothers.
WASHINGTON -More women in their early 40s are childless, and those who are having children are having fewer than ever before, the Census Bureau said Monday.
In the last 30 years, the number of women age 40 to 44 with no children has doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent. And those who are mothers have an average of 1.9 children each, more than one child fewer than women of the same age in 1976.
The report, Fertility of American Women: 2006, is the first from the Census Bureau to use data from an annual survey of 76 million women, ages 15 to 50, allowing a state-by-state comparison of fertility patterns. About 4.2 million women participating in the survey, which was conducted from January through December 2006, had had a child in the previous year. The statistics could be used by state agencies to provide maternal care services, the report said.
The survey found that in 2006 women with graduate or professional degrees recorded the most births of all educational levels. About 36 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were separated, divorced, widowed or unmarried.
Unemployed women had about twice as many babies as working women, although women in the labor force accounted for the majority _ 57 percent _ of recent births. Only a quarter of all women who had a child over the past year were living below the poverty level.
Coupled with fertility data collected biannually, the report also revealed longer term trends, including how second-generation Hispanic women are having fewer babies than their foreign-born grandmothers and first-generation American mothers.
Differences among states also emerged. California, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New York and New Jersey had a greater percentage of foreign-born women who became mothers in 2006. A bigger share of women in the Southeast and Southwest who gave birth in the year prior to the survey did so in poverty.
http://news.aol.com/article/more-women-are-having-fewer-children-if/140893?cid=14
A massive chunk of ice breaks off the Arctic ice-shelf again.
EDMONTON, Alberta (July 29) -- A chunk of ice spreading across seven square miles has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday.
Derek Mueller, a research at Trent University, was careful not to blame global warming, but said it the event was consistent with the theory that the current Arctic climate isn't rebuilding ice sheets. "We're in a different climate now," he said. "It's not conducive to regrowing them. It's a one-way process."
http://news.aol.com/article/huge-ice-sheet-breaks-loose-in-arctic/107343
Rising food prices in Africa
The sky-rocketing prices of food all over the continent of Africa is threatening peace and security especially in the Sub-Saharan section, and is forcing families to flee.
