Empty Storehouses

The Earth is on the brink of "major biodiversity crisis" fuelled by the steady destruction of ecosystems, a group of the world's most distinguished scientists and policy experts warn today.

The surging demand for corn, sugar cane and vegetable oils to make Earth-friendlier biofuels is pitting hungry cars against hungry people, and trouble’s brewing, says sustainable development pioneer Lester Brown.

"...In effect what we have are 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and two billion people who want to survive,..."

It is a wonderfully clear expression, used by a U. S. biologist about the impact of bottom trawling. "Imagine using a bulldozer to catch songbirds for food — that's what it's like," marine biologist Sylvia Earle says. "After a trawler has gone by, it looks like a superhighway, it's just flat. Nobody's home. A few fish may swim in and out but the residents, those that occupy the substrate, they're just smothered, they're crushed. It's like paving them over."

Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU).

Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU's president.

In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced.

China's insatiable demand for proteins as well as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for the workforce of the world. In the second part of our series, we reveal how the soya trade is creating a gold rush which is deforesting the Amazon

One in six countries in the world face food shortages this year because of severe droughts that could become semi-permanent under climate change, UN scientists warned yesterday...

"...Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase."

Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans
turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous
climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't
believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this..

Beijing - China's leaders have raised the alarm about their country's ability to feed itself as rapid development sucks land, water and people from the food-producing countryside into increasingly large and hungry cities. After a steady fall in grain harvests, the world's most populous nation recently became a net importer of food for the first time in its history, raising domestic political concerns and driving up international prices of wheat, rice and soya

"...For years, apparent increases in illness among marine creatures, from whales to coral, have left marine scientists with the uneasy suspicion that the seas are increasingly plagued by disease. Now, US researchers have uncovered the first good evidence that they are right...."

"The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure...."

"... "An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders."..."

Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first
omprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world.

"The prolonged heatwave has devastated crops across Europe, leaving some countries facing their worst harvests since the end of the second world war...""..."The heatwave came at a time when world food supplies were already at their most precarious ever. The amount of grain produced for each person on earth is now less than at any time in more than three decades."..."

"...Bringing the oceans' ecosystems back from the edge of collapse -- one recent study found that 90 percent of the world's big fish have disappeared -- requires dramatic, controversial and expensive efforts to limit fishing, coastal development and runoff from cities and farms, according to the Pew Oceans Commission. Its report is the product of a three-year, $5.5 million study...."

"...Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week....""...Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now. ..."

"...Greed and corruption are draining the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortés. It is not dead yet, but it is exhausted. American and Japanese ships were the first to exploit it. Now fleets of Mexican fishermen, mostly unlicensed and ungoverned, are taking whatever they can, as fast as they can, for American and Asian markets. Every important species of fish in the sea is in sharp decline, fishermen and marine scientists say. Overfishing is a global problem. People are taking marine life faster than it can reproduce. The world's catch peaked at 86 million tons in 1989, up fourfold in 50 years. But many governments, including the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Japan and China, kept on pouring subsidies into commercial fishing fleets to keep them afloat. Crucial fisheries have collapsed worldwide..."

"It could have ended all plant life on this continent," geneticist David Suzuki says in the book. "The implications of this case are nothing short of terrifying."

"...Fish farming has delivered cheap salmon to the consumer - but at a high environmental price. In this in-depth investigation, Stuart Millar talks to farmers, ecologists and scientists about the growing crisis ..." "...Perhaps the cruellest irony of the exponential growth in fish farming is that it has come close to driving wild fish, the very creature it was designed to save, to the brink of extinction. Over the past 10 years, wild salmon stocks have declined to all-time lows, but in the north-west Highlands, centre of the aquaculture industry, stocks have been devastated. The cause: infestation of sea lice on wild fish caused by the proximity of caged salmon...."