I grew up in western Texas and covered the Midwest's devastating drought of 1988. I know what a drought looks like, but I've never seen anything like the devastation to a portion of the Rift Valley near the Tanzania border that I visited today in pursuit of corn farmers.
Fog shrouded the surrounding hills as a steady rain fell in the town of Machakos today, driving customers from the shops and market stalls in the middle of town. Tarps were draped over bins of grain and beans to keep them dry. But just try to find a merchant unhappy with the rain. "No problem. It's only for a while," said one vegetable vendor in the market. "Then we'll have enough food for Kenya."
Muhammud Yusuf tends a muddy, two acre farm in southeast Bangladesh. He's been here for six years, but a few decades ago, this land did not exist. It was underwater. This land area was created by silt that floats down rivers from the Himalayan mountains. Journalists William Wheeler and Anna Katarina-Gravgaard investigate this new land, and the impact it is having on climate refugees in the region.
An issue earlier this year of New African, a widely distributed monthly news magazine, carried the cover story: "GM Food: Is it good for Africa?" The headline on the story inside gave the answer: "Seeds of destruction." That's a message that Africans have been getting for a decade at least about genetically engineered crops. And governments, with a handful of exceptions, most notably South Africa's, have kept biotech seeds out of their country, much to the frustration of the U.S. government and American agribusiness.
It remains to be seen whether genetically modified crops will ever be grown in east Africa, but in the meantime scientists already are reporting some success with improving the drought tolerance of corn, known here as maize, the old-fashion way, crossing existing lines from as far away as Mexico with lines common to Africa. Agronomist Dan Makumbi says yield improvements though this traditional breeding can mean the difference between whether small-scale farmers can feed their families or not.
The climate story of South Asia begins in the Himalayas, home to thousands of rain-fed glaciers that make up the largest body of ice outside the poles. In the winter, these glaciers capture the precipitation that makes it over the mountains. In the warmer months, they melt away water that feeds major rivers like the Ganga, the Indus, and the Brahmaputra. The system is a 'natural water tanker' for the 1.5 billion people living in the river basins below.The second important feature of the story is its extreme monsoon, in which half the rain for the season falls in only 15 days.
In some parts of the world, biotech companies have had to worry about keeping environmental activists out of their research plots. Companies can ill afford to have these big-money experiments ruined. Here in Kenya, scientists have a different worry - elephants.
What happens here in Kenya could change the way the world views genetically modified food. Whether it really makes a positive difference in the lives of Africans remains to be seen. Why is Kenya key? The first reason is obvious enough. The first transgenic, drought-tolerant maize crop intended for east Africa will be grown in field trials next year. (The photo above, provided by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, is of a conventionally bred version of drought-tolerant corn.)
In South Asia—home to a quarter of the world's population, but only 5% of its freshwater resources— development is taking a heavy toll on life's most basic necessity.
The majority of India's water sources are polluted. A lack of access to safe water contributes to a fifth of its communicable diseases. Each day in the booming, nuclear-armed nation, diarrhea alone kills more than 1,600 people.
While people across the globe are becoming more aware that the glaciers in the western Himalaya are receding, few know how information about the glaciers, weather systems, and river levels in remote regions of the world like Kashmir are gathered. Cut off from the world the better part of the past two decades, due to a bloody conflict, the region's glaciers could only be monitored through remote sensing (satellite images). But as relative peace returns, scientists are for the first time able to conduct field research on the glaciers.
In these slides, Anna-Katarina Gravgaard and Bill Wheeler travel through rural Bangladesh, examining the lives of those intimately impacted by river erosion and rising waters along the low-tide coast.
In Africa's refugee camps, having access to basic health care isn't easy. Resources are limited, safety is uncertain, and aid agencies have to work harder to save lives. Ernest Waititu spent an evening riding along in the only ambulance serving Kenya's sprawling Kakuma Refugee Camp. The camp is home to more than 40,000 refugees from more than 10 countries in Eastern Africa.
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