Small changes can yield big savings in agricultural water use

California agricultural could potentially avoid more extreme water-saving measures as it faces challenges from climate change and water scarcity

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

 

IMAGE: 

THREE SCHEMA OF SWITCHING CROPS, CHANGING FARMING PRACTICES, AND FALLOWING FIELDS ALL YIELDED AVERAGE WATER SAVINGS AROUND 10%.

 

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CREDIT: BOSER ET AL.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — While Hollywood and Silicon Valley love the limelight, California is an agricultural powerhouse, too. Agricultural products sold in the Golden State totaled $59 billion in 2022. But rising temperatures, declining precipitation and decades of over pumping may require drastic changes to farming. Legislation to address the problem could even see fields taken out of cultivation.

Fortunately, a study out of UC Santa Barbara suggests less extreme measures could help address California’s water issues. Researchers combined remote sensing, big data and machine learning to estimate how much water crops use in the state’s Central Valley. The results, published in Nature Communications, suggest that variation in efficiency due to farming practices could save as much water as switching crops or fallowing fields.

“There’s an opportunity for less obtrusive methods of saving water to be more important than we originally thought,” said lead author Anna Boser, a doctoral student at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “So we might not have to make as many changes in land use as we originally thought.”

California’s fertile soils and Mediterranean climate enable farmers to cultivate high-value crops that just aren’t viable in the rest of the country. Over a third of the country’s vegetables, and nearly three-quarters of fruits and nuts, are grown in California, according to the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

But many of these crops are quite thirsty. Agriculture accounts for around 80% of water used in California, explained co-author Kelly Caylor, a professor at the Bren School. “Declining groundwater levels and a changing climate put pressure on the availability of irrigation water, making it critical to determine how we can ‘do more with less.’”

In 2014, Sacramento passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to secure California’s water resources. SGMA mandates that every groundwater basin in the state must be sustainable by 2040. Each basin created a local agency tasked with developing a plan to meet this goal. Mostly, that means ensuring that we don’t pump more water out of the ground than what seeps in. We will need to reduce total groundwater use by 20% to 50% by 2040, depending on the basin, Boser said. But to accomplish this, we need an idea of how much water farms use, and what fraction of that actually makes it to crops.

Modeling water use

Scientists have a variety of methods to estimate the amount of water ascending from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere due to evaporation and transpiration through plant leaves. Notably, evaporation cools things down. “When we get hot, we sweat to cool off. The Earth does something similar,” Boser said. Scientists look at how warm the ground is and see how much energy it’s getting from sunlight and the atmosphere. If the ground is cooler than expected, it means some of that energy was used to turn water into vapor, which cools down that spot.

An evapotranspiration database called OpenET became publicly available in early 2023. It provides satellite-based evapotranspiration estimates for the western United States. But Boser was interested in the water being used specifically by crops. So, she compared transpiration in fallowed fields to active fields across the Central Valley. Subtracting evapotranspiration in fallow fields from total evapotranspiration yields the amount of water that crops are actually consuming.

Unfortunately for Boser, farmers don’t fallow fields randomly. Often they’ll take their lowest-yielding fields out of production. That creates systematic differences between fallowed and cultivated fields, which could skew Boser’s analysis. So, she created a machine-learning model to conduct a weighted comparison between active and fallowed land, accounting for factors like location, topography and soil quality.

She trained the model on 60% of the areas and tested its results on 30%, fine tuning the algorithm until its predictions matched the actual conditions in these fields within 10 milliliters per square meter per day, on average. Now confident in her model, she applied it to the rest of California’s Central Valley.

Encouraging results

Crop type only explained 34% of the variation in water consumption. “What that means is maybe we’re overlooking some other ways that we could save water,” Boser said. She continued to investigate the model, controlling for factors like location, topography, local climate, soil quality and orchard age (when applicable). Ultimately, a full 10% of crop transpiration could be saved if the top 50% of water users reduced their water consumption to match that of their median-consuming neighbors. Boser attributes these savings to differences in “farming practices.”

Now, 10% might not sound like a lot, but it’s comparable to a number of other interventions. The authors also estimated the effect of switching crops. If the same 50% of farmers switched to the median water-intensive crops for their area, agricultural evapotranspiration would drop by 10%.

Meanwhile, if the state took the top 5% most water-hungry fields out of production, the model says agricultural evapotranspiration would drop by, you guessed it: 10%. This suggests that addressing inefficiencies in farming practices could save as much water as switching crops or taking fields out of cultivation.

To be fair, the results from fallowing would affect only 5% of cultivated land, as opposed to 50% for crop changes and improved farming practices. “We’re probably going to have to fall back on fallowing at least a little bit,” Boser said, “but hopefully not as much as we were originally expecting.”

The authors want to figure out what practices farmers are using that account for the 10% differences in crop water usage. Some examples include mulching, no-till planting, using drought-tolerant varietals, and deficit irrigation — where you provide less water than the crop could theoretically consume. Deficit irrigation already yields good results in viticulture, where vintners find it can improve the quality of wine.

Changing irrigation practices could also help reduce water use. Irrigation efficiency accounts for the fraction of water a farm uses that actually gets consumed by crops. Inefficiencies include leakage, weed growth and evaporation in transport and in the field. These weren’t within the scope of Boser’s model, which only considers transpiration by the crops themselves. Inefficiencies happen before the water even gets to the plants.

According to Boser, up to 60% of the water a farm uses actually passes through the roots of its crops. Clearly there’s plenty of potential gains in this area, though it isn’t clear what efficiency is actually attainable, she said. “Irrigation efficiency is actually quite poorly understood.”

Better characterizing this is on the team’s to-do list. They hope to identify the causes of irrigation inefficiencies, quantify the efficiencies of different types of irrigation, and learn how climate and geography affects irrigation efficiency. All this will require collecting empirical data.

California is at a critical crossroads in water management. For the first time in its history, the state is putting in place regulations that require substantial reductions in groundwater extraction, including in regions where livelihoods depend on thirsty agricultural production.

“This paper uses novel, data-driven methods to show that, contrary to popular belief, there is large potential to cut water use in California agriculture without fallowing fields,” said co-author Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor at UCSB’s Bren School. “This raises the possibility that the state can continue its role as an agricultural powerhouse while also sustainably managing an essential natural resource.”

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

 

Better phosphorus use can ensure its stocks last more than 500 years and boost global food production - new evidence shows

More efficient use of phosphorus could see limited stocks of the important fertiliser last more than 500 years and boost global food production to feed growing populations.

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

More efficient use of phosphorus could see limited stocks of the important fertiliser last more than 500 years and boost global food production to feed growing populations.

But these benefits will only happen if countries are less wasteful with how they use phosphorus, a study published today in Nature Food shows.

Around 30-40 per cent of farm soils have over-applications of phosphorus, with European and North American countries over-applying the most.

The global population is due to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050 and it is estimated that to feed this increased population a further 500 million hectares of arable land will be needed – unless phosphorus can be more efficiently used to boost and maintain crop yields.

Listed as a critical raw material by the European Union, and recently a topic of discussion by the United Nations Environment Assembly, globally 20,500 kilotons of phosphorus are applied to agricultural soils each year as fertiliser.

Concerns have been raised about its limited supply and loss to freshwater where it can degrade water quality. Phosphorus predominantly comes from mining phosphate rock sources, of which there are only a relatively small number of sources located in countries like Morocco and Russia.

Previous estimates of how much phosphorus we have left globally have varied greatly from between 30 to over 300 years. These prior estimates were based on current wasteful practices continuing and contained a lot of uncertainty.

This latest research, looking at global phosphorus use and soil concentrations, by scientists at Lancaster University in the UK as well as AgResearch and Lincoln University in New Zealand, examined concentrations of phosphorus in farm soils across the globe for optimum growth of 28 major food crops from wheat and maize to rice and apples. The research revealed soils that did not contain enough phosphorus, and soils that contain concentrations higher than plants need for optimal growth.

Their findings shed new light on the amounts of phosphorus available in soils and needed as fertilisers and reveal that phosphorus reserves could last for up to 531 years if we use it more efficiently and equitably – that’s 77 years longer than if we stick with current practices.

Professor Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University and co-author of the paper said: “Phosphorus is an essential fertiliser that drives food production on farms around the world. It’s the ‘energy’ of agriculture that drives our food systems, but we need to manage our supplies carefully.

“We need to seek ways to be more efficient and sustainable with its use and our study shows that there’s considerable potential to improve the efficiency of how we use phosphorus fertilisers. We show it’s possible to optimise global food production without accelerating the depletion of precious and finite global phosphorus fertiliser reserves.  

“We are unlikely to run out of phosphorus in the next 500 years, but only if we apply as much as needed to produce optimal crop yields and stop wasteful over-applications.”

The research team calculated 10,556 kt of phosphorus is wasted each year through over-application with much of that dominated by wheat and grassland in Europe and maize and rice in Asia.

Professor Richard McDowell of Lincoln University and AgResearch New Zealand and lead author of the study said: “Many farmers over-apply phosphorus to bank it in the soil. However, only a fraction of soil phosphorus can be used by plants. Adjusting applications to sustain the levels that plans need to produce optimal yields negates the need for phosphorus being wasted. If there are excessive levels in soil that plants can’t use, phosphorus can potentially be lost to water, which risks causing water quality problems like eutrophication.”

But it is not all about reductions. The scientists, using data for farmland globally, also calculated that around the world nearly three quarters of farmed soils are in phosphorus deficit - with phosphorus deficits being most acute in Asian countries such as India. As a result, the researchers calculate that globally there needs to be an application of almost 57,000 kt of phosphorus to alleviate those soils in deficit to boost crop yields.

They then calculated that 17,500 kt of phosphorus is needed each year to maintain optimum soil phosphorus concentrations. This would result in a global reduction in the demand for phosphorus by around 3,000 kt annually.

Professor McDowell said: “The science is clear, but to use phosphorus efficiently and extend supplies, governments need to collaborate to make policy that promote phosphorus use only where needed. That will involve balancing distributions of phosphorus for optimal crop growth and reducing subsidies that sustain overuse of phosphorus and likely cause water quality problems.”

The findings are outlined in the paper ‘Phosphorus applications adjusted to optimal crop yields can help sustain global phosphorus reserves’ published by Nature Food.

The paper’s authors are Professor Richard McDowell and Peter Pletnyakov of Lincoln University and AgResearch, and Professor Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University. Professor McDowell was funded by New Zealand’s Our Land and Water National Science Challenge.

 

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Food

DOI

10.1038/s43016-024-00952-9 

ARTICLE TITLE

Phosphorus applications adjusted to optimal crop yields can help sustain global phosphorus reserves

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Mar-2024

END THE EMBARGO!
Rationed food kept Cubans fed during the Cold War. Today an economic crisis has them hungry

Sat, March 23, 2024 



HAVANA (AP) — Like millions of other Cubans, María de los Ángeles Pozo thinks back fondly to when a government ration book fed her family everything from hamburgers, fish and milk to chocolate and beer. People would even get cakes for birthdays and weddings.

The “libreta,” as Cubans know it, was launched in July 1963 and became one of the pillars of the island’s socialist system, helping people through crises including the cutbacks in Soviet aid that led to the 1990s deprivation known as the “Special Period.”

That system is undergoing a deep economic crisis that has prompted the exodus of almost half a million Cubans to the U.S. over the last two years, with thousands more heading to Europe. It also has led to a dramatic reduction in the availability of rationed food for those who do not leave.

Many Cubans feel ill-equipped to handle their new, more unequal country, a feeling that has worsened as small private markets have opened, charging prices similar to international ones in a country that hasn’t allowed non-state commerce in recent decades and where incomes remain between $16 and $23 monthly.


“Everything comes in small portions and delayed,” said Pozo, 57, a school worker who retired to care for her disabled sister and father in the apartment they share in Old Havana. They earn $10 a month between the three.

Basic goods like a kilo (2.2 pounds) of powdered milk can cost as much as $8.

“We don’t have the goods that we were used to anymore,” Pozo said. “We’re suffering a lot of deprivation.”

Protesters took to the streets in the eastern city of Santiago this month decrying power outages lasting up to eight hours and shortages of food. State media confirmed the protests in Santiago and videos showing people chanting “electricity and food” were quickly shared by Cubans on and off the island on platforms like X and Facebook. A nongovernmental human rights group that monitors Cuba said there had been at least three arrests.

Pozo pays only $2 at the subsidized state stores at current exchange rates. In February she got a few pounds of rice, beans, some sugar and salt, oil, processed meat and soap for her family of three.

Pozo said that she doesn’t receive money from relatives overseas, a major marker of class differences in 2024 Cuba, and one that about 70 percent of families do get.

While there are no official figures, many experts estimate that Cubans overseas sent $3 billion home in 2019.

Cuba has long struggled with a lack of production.

The lack of hard currency and needed equipment is making the situation even worse without agricultural supplies like insecticides and fertilizers, said Ricardo Torres, an economist at American University in Washington.

Without a functioning market economy, Cuban agriculture has long measured itself by socialist production goals that it has rarely been able to meet.

Camaguey, one of Cuba’s main ranching hubs, only produced 42.8 million liters (11.3 million gallons) of milk last year, out of 81.3 million liters (21.5 million gallons) that producers had agreed to sell.

Producers, for their part, complain that government prices don’t cover expenses.

The Cuban government blames the economic damage wrought by COVID-19, along with U.S. sanctions and macroeconomic changes dating to recent years that have led to severe inflation.

“You can see today private stores that have all the products that you want: milk, bread, sugar — whatever you want — at prices that are not accessible to the majority of the population,” Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said in a interview with The Associated Press. “The government continues to be committed to provide an equal amount to all.”

Official figures show Cuba’s average annual inflation of nearly 50% a year over the last three years and a 2% contraction in the Gross Domestic Product.

Faced with that scenario, the government has been trying to reduce the number of people who receive subsidized food from an estimated four million libretas.

For most Cubans, the government is failing to take on the most serious issue: low take-home pay as a result of low productivity and inflation.

“Salaries must rise,” said maintenance main Hilmer Pagán, 53.

___

Andrea Rodríguez on X: www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

Andrea Rodriguez, The Associated Press

Moscow mourns amid international blame game

March 24, 2024

Tracy Moran GZERO

Russian President Vladimir Putin lights a candle in memory of the victims of the Crocus City Hall attack, on the day of national mourning in a church at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia March 24, 2024. 

 Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERS

President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday a national day of mourning for the 137 people killed at the Crocus City Hall outside Moscow on Friday. Several gunmen opened fire at the popular music venue late Friday, injuring another 180 and leaving more than a third of the building on fire. Crews are still sifting through the debris for bodies.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, which came just weeks after Washington warned of possible terrorism at large venues in the Moscow area, which Putin notably ridiculed as fearmongering.

What motivated the militants? In a word: Syria. Russia has been helping the Assad regime ramp up its attacks on Islamic State strongholds in recent months, but the battles have been going on for years, with anger festering over Putin’s support for President Bashar al-Assad.

Still, Putin looks east. Despite the Islamic State’s admission, Putin tried to blame Ukraine. He also blamed “international terrorism” but said the perpetrators — 11 have been arrested, including four of the gunmen — were trying to flee to Ukraine after the attack.

Ukraine has repeatedly denied any role in Friday’s tragedy. Meanwhile, Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities intensified over the weekend, with drones hitting Kyiv and Lviv, along the Polish border. While no one was injured, Poland reported that Russian cruise missiles had entered its airspace.

"Pointing the finger at Ukraine and sidelining the ISIS-K angle — at least in official statements — serves the Kremlin’s purpose of rationalizing a potential escalation in its military operations against the adversary," says Eurasia Group analyst Tinatin Japaridze, possibly including a new round of conscription, though Putin did not mention mobilization specifically on Saturday.

Russian propaganda channels post photos and videos of Moscow terror attack suspects being tortured

KATERYNA TYSHCHENKO — SUNDAY, 24 MARCH 2024

A PHOTO RELEASED BY ISLAMIC STATE OF THE TERRORISTS WHO ATTACKED THE CROCUS CITY HALL. PHOTO: SITE

Russian Telegram channels close to the Russian security services have posted a photo that allegedly shows Shamsiddin Fariduni being interrogated and tortured by electrocution. Fariduni has been detained on suspicion of committing the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow Oblast.

Source: Latvia-based Russian media outlet Meduza with reference to Telegram channels

Details: The man in the photo is lying on the floor with his trousers down. A TA-57 field telephone, which the security forces use to apply electric current, is allegedly connected to his body. The clamp of the wire appears to be connected to his genitals (that part of the photo is blurred).

According to the description provided by the Telegram channel Grey Zone, the voltage is 80 volts, and water is being poured over the suspect to intensify the effect.

Earlier, a video of the interrogation of another suspect, Radzhab Alizade, was posted by propaganda channels. In this video, a man in camouflage holds Alizade on the ground, then cuts a piece off his right ear with a knife and attempts to force the alleged terrorist to eat it.

Ukrainska Pravda will not be publishing these photos and videos for ethical reasons.

Previously: ISIS called the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow Oblast their "most brutal attack in recent years" and posted photos of the terrorists wearing the same clothing as the detainees whose photos have been posted by the FSB.

Background:

• The shooting incident occurred prior to a concert by the band Piknik at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, on the evening of 22 March. Afterwards, a large fire broke out in the auditorium. The latest reports say 137 people have died, including three children, and 180 people were injured.
• Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU) said the terrorist attack was a deliberate provocation by Putin’s regime that had been anticipated by the international community. Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Head of the Ukrainian President’s Office, stated that Ukraine had nothing to do with the attack.
• Russian leader Vladimir Putin claimed that a "back door" had been prepared for the suspects to cross the border into Ukraine. Ukraine's Defence Intelligence responded by saying that these claims are entirely devoid of truth.
• The United States says it has no doubt that ISIS was involved in the terrorist attack and had warned Russia in advance of the threat of such an attack.

Moscow concert hall accused of locking

emergency exits before terror attack that

 killed 137

James Kilner
Sun, 24 March 2024 

Smoke rises above Crocus City Hall after the attack on Friday - Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Emergency exits at the Moscow concert hall where gunmen killed 137 people could not be opened, some of the survivors have claimed.

Russian media have reported that more people may have died from smoke inhalation than gunshot wounds during the attack on Friday.

Some 28 bodies are thought to have been found in a lavatory and another 14 in the stairwell of an emergency exit.

Trapped people hiding from the gunmen reportedly called emergency services pleading to be rescued as thick smoke filled the building.

People fleeing from the gunmen found some exits had been locked in what appeared to have been a well-planned attack

A video shot by a survivor on his mobile phone showed people desperately rattling the handles of closed emergency exits as they tried to flee.

“This is a locked door,” the survivor is heard telling his companion.

In what appears to be a well-planned attack, the gunmen set fire to the building.

Baza, a Telegram channel linked to the Russian security services, said that bodies piled up next to emergency exits which may have been blocked shut.

In an interview with the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, an unnamed survivor said that he had been forced to dash through the main entrance of the concert hall, where the gunmen had started their attack, because the fire exits would not open.

“We tried the fire escape ladder, but it was closed. People climbed the ladder, descended the ladder, all closed,” he said.
Sensitive issue in Russia

The issue of blocked or locked fire exits is sensitive in Russia. In 2018, more than 60 people died in a shopping mall fire in Siberia because the alarms had been turned off and the escape exits had been locked.

Aras Agalarov, the owner of Crocus City Hall, has denied that any of the fire escape exits were locked and several survivors of the attack have said that they escaped through emergency exits.

The attack, responsibility for which has been claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group, is the deadliest on Russian soil in years.

Some families still don’t know whether relatives who went to the event attacked by gunmen on Friday are alive. Moscow’s department of health said on Sunday that it has begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, which will take at least two weeks.

The Moscow region’s ministry of emergency situations posted a video on Sunday showing equipment dismantling the damaged music venue to give rescuers access

Russian TV shows questioning of Moscow

attack suspects

AFP
Sat, March 23, 2024 

Gunmen opened fire at Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow and set it ablaze (Handout)


Russian television on Saturday aired footage of the detention and questioning of four men suspected of carrying out the deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall.

Russia's Channel One television showed footage of four suspects and their damaged white Renault car.

It said they were captured by special forces in the village of Khatsun in the western Bryansk region, which is close to borders with Ukraine and Belarus.


In footage shot at night and in daylight, the detained men speak Russian with an accent.

The Islamic State (IS) group has claimed responsibility for Friday night's attack, when a group of gunmen opened fire at Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow and set it ablaze.

They killed at least 133 people.

The interior ministry said Saturday that all four suspected gunmen were foreign nationals.

A Russian MP has said some of those detained are from Tajikistan, an impoverished post-Soviet state that borders Afghanistan and whose nationals have participated in previous IS attacks.

"What were you doing at Crocus?" a young bearded man seated on the ground is asked.

"I shot people.. for money," he answers in broken Russian. He goes on to say he was offered "half a million rubles ($5,425)" and had received half of it on a bank card.

- Contacted on Telegram -

Those who had hired them had supplied them with the weapons, he added, corresponding with him on the Telegram secure messaging platform without giving their names.

The footage also shows one suspect being led along on a snowy track in a forest. The dark-haired man in a light brown T-shirt has blood pouring down his cheek from his ear.

He too is shown being questioned with a bandage wrapped around his head, his lips and nose bloodied and swollen.

Asked what the suspected attackers did with their weapons, he says they were left "somewhere on the road".

Earlier, a graphic video was posted online, apparently showing the detention of the same suspect.

It showed a man in camouflage cutting off part of the ear of a dark-haired man, trying to make him eat it and then hitting him on the face.

Russian television showed other suspects with cuts to their faces.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said that Chechen soldiers had helped the FSB security service capture the suspects.

Belarus said that it had assisted Russia in detaining the men "to prevent them from leaving through our common border".

None of those questioned mentioned either Islamic State or Ukraine in the footage broadcast.

Russian officials have not mentioned the Islamic State group in their public statements, but President Vladimir Putin said Saturday the suspects had been planning to cross the border into Ukraine.

Kyiv firmly denies any involvement and has dismissed any suggestion the gunmen could have been heading into Ukraine.

Russia has said it has detained 11 people including four suspected gunmen.

bur/jj

Israel to block aid convoys to northern Gaza, says UNRWA 


Sky News
Sun, 24 March 2024 

In this article:  Philippe Lazzarini  UN official


The head of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency has said it's "outrageous" Israel will block its aid deliveries to northern Gaza.

UNRWA boss Philippe Lazzarini said Israel had told the United Nations that convoys would no longer be approved.

It comes after Israel accused 12 UNRWA staff of participating in October's Hamas terror attack. Nine of the accused workers were sacked.

America and the UK are among the countries that have paused funding to the agency, but others such as Canada and Australia have since resumed donations.

"This is outrageous and makes it intentional to obstruct life-saving assistance during a man-made famine," Mr Lazzarini said on X on Sunday.

"These restrictions must be lifted."

Israel did not immediately respond to the claims.

Experts say most of Gaza's population is on the brink of famine due to Israel's ongoing military operation to destroy Hamas.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has also been at Egypt's Rafah border crossing, where a huge backlog of aid trucks is waiting to get into Gaza from the south.

Mr Guterres said the food situation was a "moral outrage" and that Israel must remove "obstacles" to the aid. Israel denies blocking supplies.

"Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are galloping across it," said the UN boss.

Some aid recently arrived in Gaza by sea, while some has been dropped from planes, but constant land-based deliveries are vital if famine is to be avoided, according to experts and charities.

October's surprise Hamas attack on Israel killed more than 1,200 people and the group is still holding about 100 hostages.

More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in the Israeli response, according to Gaza's health ministry, but Israel blames Hamas for embedding itself among the population.

There are fears thousands more could die when Israel launches a ground offensive in Rafah - the southern city where many have fled.

Meanwhile, Israel's military has said a raid on Gaza's main hospital has killed more than 170 militants, with about 480 suspects detained.

The raid on Shifa hospital in Gaza City began last Monday, mirroring another major offensive there in November.

Israel says Hamas is still using it as a base despite thousands of displaced people living around the complex.

Hamas and medical staff deny the claims and Gaza's health ministry said dozens of staff and patients were among those detained in the latest operation.

Israeli forces also carried out "very intense shelling" at al Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Israel said it acted at al Amal after "precise intelligence... which indicated that terrorists are using civilian infrastructure for terror activities".

It added its troops weren't currently inside the hospital.

Israel and its allies – including the UK – are going to deliver a planned famine in Gaza

Posted on March 20 2024

The IPC describes itself as follows in its website:

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is an innovative multi-partner initiative for improving food security and nutrition analysis and decision-making. By using the IPC classification and analytical approach, Governments, UN Agencies, NGOs, civil society and other relevant actors, work together to determine the severity and magnitude of acute and chronic food insecurity, and acute malnutrition situations in a country, according to internationally-recognised scientific standards.

The IPC has issued a report on Gaza, based on its scale of crisis assessment, which is as follows:

They say the situation in Gaza in the last month was as follows:

And then they note that they expect things to change as follows over the next few months:

Israel controls food supply into Gaza. No one else can.

Israel is not permitting sufficient food into Gaza. As a result 50 per cent of its population now face famine. Most of the rest face a food crisis.

International law does not permit Israel to do this. Its actions are clearly illegal. But countries like the UK and USA permit it by supplying the arms Israel needs to crush Gaza and impose this famine.

It is my hope that not just those in Israel imposing this famine should be punished, but so too should those in this and other countries that let it happen, knowing it was going on.

Here’s what I saw as a doctor treating children in Gaza

Gaza needs to be inundated with shipments of food, water, medicine and fuel to begin the lengthy road to recovery, writes a doctor from Oak Lawn who recently worked in Gaza.

Opinion
By Thaer Ahmad, M.D.
Mar 20, 2024

Children walk past the rubble of a collapsed building with a pot of food provided by a charity organization ahead of the fast-breaking “iftar” meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. They’re shown March 16 in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty

In January, I joined the WHO’s Emergency Medical Teams deployed to Gaza as a member of MedGlobal. I worked in Gaza’s largest remaining hospital, Al-Nasser in Khan Younis.

As I roamed the hospital’s corridors, I was struck by how many displaced people were sheltering in and around the hospital complex. Many were children running and playing "Ring Around the Rosie." It seemed hauntingly out of place against the grim backdrop of bombs and tank shells.

I can’t help but reflect on the suffering and disorder the children of Gaza have encountered during this war.

One evening, as I wandered through the pediatric division, the nurse accompanying me, Shehab, showed me the patient rooms. Many were suffering from upper respiratory infections or diarrheal illnesses. Each room, no bigger than the size of a walk-in closet, had four patients and their caretakers in it, except one room. It had only three patients. The room corner adjacent to the window where the fourth patient would be was empty and the walls were damaged.

Shehab told me the space had belonged to Dunia Abu Mohsen, a 12-year-old who was recovering in the hospital after an airstrike hit her home and killed her family. Dunia had lost her leg in the attack but miraculously survived and awaited a transfer out of Gaza to be fitted for a prosthesis. She dreamed of one day becoming a physician.

Two weeks after being interviewed chronicling her recovery, an Israeli tank shell burst through the window of Dunia’s room and killed her. She is one of more than 12,000 Gazan children killed. Her nurse told me in her last days, Dunia had grown increasingly withdrawn and detached. She had begun to feel the absence of her family.

No one in Gaza has it easy, but for Palestinian children all aspects of life are disrupted and broken. There has been no schooling since the war started, and 75% of the educational infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged.

Palestinian society greatly values education and boasts some of the highest literacy rates globally. Six hundred thousand displaced children are in Rafah, which had a population of 250,000 before Oct. 7. An entire cohort is trapped in the southern edge of Gaza, with schooling stalled. If they survive the war, their futures are inevitably compromised.
Children die of hunger

As food and water are logjammed at the border with Egypt, the rise of extreme hunger and starvation particularly affects vulnerable populations like children.

In Northern Gaza, where there is a looming famine, more than 20 children have starved to death. After the flour massacre, in which Israeli tanks killed more than 100 Palestinians seeking bread for their hungry families, I tremble at the thought of more starving children dying.

In January, UNICEF found one in six children younger than 2 in Northern Gaza were severely malnourished and in need of urgent treatment. While in Khan Younis, our diets mainly consisted of bread and beans. Food poverty must be addressed.

My interactions with Gazan families confirmed the astounding resilience and steadfastness they were known for, but more than five months of immense death and destruction will leave a mark on even the strongest of us.

Many in Gaza believe there is a “war after the war,” referring to a time when everyone will have to process all that has transpired. Surely, this will impact children more severely.

They’ve endured multiple conflicts over the last decade, and perhaps the consequences are best demonstrated by a study before Oct. 7 by Save the Children that found half of the children of Gaza had contemplated suicide and three out of five were self-harming.

With no psycho-social support interventions in place, and with health care infrastructure collapsed and homes destroyed, what will become of the surviving children, 17,000 of whom have been orphaned during this war? Who will hug them? Who will cover them with a blanket when they’ve fallen asleep? Who will help feed them when they’re hungry?

A cease-fire is just the beginning. Gaza needs to be inundated with shipments of food, water, medicine and fuel to begin the lengthy road to recovery. Too many tragic stories have emerged that will haunt us eternally. Children like Dunia are lost forever, and a million more are at risk.

There is no time to waste. They need us now. Tell their stories, contribute generously to their healing, and advocate to policymakers and elected officials for their safety and security.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is the emergency department director of global health and medical ethics and an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

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The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.

ICYMI

CANADA WILL HALT ALL ARMS SHIPMENTS TO ISRAEL AS TRUDEAU GETS CRITICAL OF NETANYAHU


AFP
MARCH 21, 2024
Montreal, Canada

The Justin Trudeau-government is halting all exports of weapons to Israel and said the ground reality has forced the government to make such a move. (Image: Reuters)

Israel is a major receiver of Canadian weapons exports and said Canada’s decision will be judged harshly.

Canada will halt all arms shipments to Israel, a government official told AFP on Tuesday, a decision that has drawn the ire of Israel as it faces growing international scrutiny over its war in the Gaza Strip.

The besieged Palestinian territory is facing a mounting humanitarian crisis, and months of war have pushed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the brink of famine.

Canada, a key ally of the United States, which provides Israel with billions of dollars a year in military aid, had already reduced its weapons shipments to Israel to non-lethal equipment such as radios following the October 7 Hamas attack.

“The situation on the ground makes it so that we can’t” export any kind of military equipment, the Canadian official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Canada’s foreign minister Melanie Joly told the Toronto Star newspaper on Tuesday that Ottawa would stop future arms exports to Israel.

Israel slammed the decision, with foreign minister Israel Katz saying it “undermines Israel’s right to self-defense against Hamas terrorists.”

“History will judge Canada’s current action harshly,” he said in a post on social media platform X.

US Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the move, saying in a post on X: “Given the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, including widespread and growing starvation, the US should not provide another nickel for Netanyahu’s war machine.”

Israel has historically been a top receiver of Canadian arms exports, with CAN$21 million worth of military materiel exported to Israel in 2022, according to Radio Canada, following CAN$26 million in shipments in 2021.

That places Israel among the top 10 recipients of Canadian arms exports.

Ottawa has only exported “non-lethal” shipments such as communications equipment to Israel since the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel triggered a war in the Gaza Strip.

No exports had been sent since January, the government official added.

The bloodiest-ever Gaza war broke out after an unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7 resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Militants also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 who are presumed dead.

Israel has responded with a relentless offensive against Hamas that has killed at least 31,819 people, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

While affirming Israel’s right to defend itself, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken an increasingly critical stance toward Israel as civilian deaths have mounted in Gaza.

On Monday, the Canadian Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution calling for the international community to work toward a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

The issue of arms deliveries to Israel has triggered legal proceedings in several countries around the world.

In Canada, a coalition of lawyers and citizens of Palestinian origin filed a complaint against the government in early March to suspend arms exports to Israel, accusing it of violating both international and domestic law.

Forced Rafah population transfer would be a 'war crime', Macron warns Israel

Sun, 24 March 2024 


French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that any forced transfer of people from the southern Gaza city of Rafah would constitute "a war crime".

In a telephone call between the two leaders, Macron also "strongly condemned" Israel's announcement Friday of the seizure of 800 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank for new settlements, said his office.

Activists say Israel's declaration that the land in the northern Jordan Valley was now "state land" was the single largest such seizure in decades.

Macron also repeated his opposition to any Israeli military operation to fight Hamas in Rafah, where most of Gaza's population has taken shelter after months of fierce fighting in the besieged territory.

In the call, Macron told Netanyahu he intended to bring a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling for "an immediate and lasting ceasefire".

He urged Israel to immediately open all crossing points into Gaza.

Macron also had talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II, during which they discussed the "unjustifiable humanitarian situation in Gaza", said the Elysee Palace.

Forcing civilians to run the risk of famine was "unjustifiable", the two leaders said.

They also agreed on the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that "implied the creation of a Palestinian state including Gaza".

 

Neighborhood-level poverty and food insecurity during pregnancy associated with lower birthweight and small for gestational age infants, NIH study finds

ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON CHILD HEALTH OUTCOMES

 

IMAGE: 

ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON HEALTH OUTCOMES 

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CREDIT: NIH ECHO PROGRAM

Living in neighborhoods where residents have lower incomes and limited food access during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of babies born small for gestational age or with lower birthweight, according to a new study from the NIH Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program.

Previous studies have shown that maternal diet during pregnancy can impact the physical and mental health of a mother. However, less is known about how food insecurity affects health outcomes for newborns. In a new research article, ECHO researchers analyzed data to understand what connections might exist between where a pregnant person lives, their access to food, and birth outcomes.

This ECHO analysis, recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, indicates a possible connection.

“Given the long-term effects of adverse birth outcomes on later cardiovascular disease risk and other conditions, more research is needed to evaluate whether interventions and policies that improve food access during pregnancy would be effective in improving birth outcomes and promoting child health,” said Izzuddin M. Aris, PhD, of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.

Using nationwide data from more than 22,000 ECHO Cohort participants, a team of ECHO researchers found that, during pregnancy, 24% of those participants lived in a low-income neighborhood where a third or more residents lived over one mile from a grocery store (or more than 10 miles in rural areas). They also found that about 14% of the participants lived in neighborhoods with high poverty rates and where more than 100 households had no access to a vehicle and lived more than half a mile from the nearest grocery store.

Residence in low-income, low-food-access and low-income, low-vehicle-access neighborhoods was associated with lower birth weight, higher odds of babies born small for gestational age, and lower odds of babies born large for gestational age. However, researchers did not find any associations of individual food insecurity with birth outcomes. 

To conduct this study, researchers matched pregnant individuals' home addresses with information about nearby food availability from the U.S. Food Access Research Atlas, which provided data on household income, the availability of a household vehicle, and where people can access food in different neighborhoods.

“In future studies, we want to look at health habits and chemical exposures to understand what else could be affecting birth outcomes,” said Dr. Aris.

Dr. Aris led a team of ECHO Cohort researchers from across the country who collaborated on the data analysis and writing for this research article.

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About ECHO: Launched in 2016, the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program is a research program in the Office of the Director at the NIH with the mission to enhance the health of children for generations to come. ECHO investigators study the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development. For more information, visit echochildren.org.

About the NIH: NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information, visit www.nih.gov.

 

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JOURNAL

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

DOI

10.1016/j.ajcnut.2024.02.022 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Birth outcomes in relation to neighborhood food access and individual food insecurity during pregnancy in the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)-wide cohort study