‘Little Boy’ Devouring African Food

Credit: Anne Holmes/IPSBy Jeff WilliamsMombasa, Kenya, Apr 7 2016 (IPS)There is a ‘Little Boy’ who has nothing to do with the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. This time it is about another ‘Little Boy’ who has been devastating the harvests in many regions, especially in Africa. This ‘Little Boy’ (from El Niño in Spanish) is a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific including the coasts of South America. In Latin America the term “El Niño” refers to the Child Jesus, so named because the pool of warm water in the Pacific near South America is often at its warmest around Christmas.In other words, the current El Niño, which in 2015 and 2016 has been among the strongest on record, affects the climate world wide, unleashing more floods in some areas and longer periods of droughts in others, as well as stronger typhoons and cyclones.The point is that developing countries dependent upon agriculture and fishing, particularly those bordering the Pacific Ocean, are the most affected by ‘Little Boy’.In the specific case of Africa, this adds a new, heavy burden on food production in this vast continent, which is home to 54 countries with a total combined population of more than 1,2 billion inhabitants. Why?On the one hand, because while roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year —around 1.3 billion tonnes...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Africa Editors' Choice Featured Food & Agriculture Headlines Health Middle East & North Africa Poverty & SDGs Projects TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news