A great website about Food Security

All Year 13's studying Life on the Margins (unit 4) should make sure that they look at and bookmark The Guardian's section on Food Security - an absolutely fantastic site with lots of very recent stories.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/food-security

Kenilworth Geography department on Twitter

In lots of parents evenings teachers tell students and parents that a key way of doing well in Georaphy is to keep up to date with current affairs and news. That is partly why this blog exists. However, I only post up a small percentage of relevant news stories, mainly because I want to focus on the most important stories, but there are plenty of news events that are relevant to your studies appearng every hour of the day......so to make sure you know what stories are important and helpful to read, I have set up a twitter account to tweet links to the latest news whenever I see a story. The wonders of modern technology mean that you can hear the latest news very quickly, without even having to follow the news, just the KenilworthGeog twitter account.

twitter.com/#!/kenilworthgeog or click on the title of the post to be taken there

Life on the margins - Year 13

Click on the title to be taken to a useful website showing food insecurity and famine. It's called Famine Early Warning System (www.fews.net) and they are currently predicting some major famines in the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia)


The site lists lots of countries, in different continents and presents case studies and maps showing food insecurity issues. It explains some of the causes of the problems in each of those countries.


I would say that this website is pretty much essential for all of you studying Life on the Margins.

This is a map, taken from the website, showing the current situation in Ethiopia. There are maps for a huge number of countries and not only do they show the information like this they also have pages which tell you WHO is being affected and WHAT the underlying CAUSES are.
Click here for the underlying causes of food insecurity in Ethiopia (just one of many case studies available on the site)










The website deals with countries from all over the world - Here is a link to how a tropical storm threatened food security in Central America in October - a recent report published on the 3rd of November 2011. It is well detailed and looks at the crops damaged and numbers of people affected

World population reaches 7 billion.

When this blog started about 2 years ago, I put a population counter clock in the corner of the page. It read 6.2billion. That figure has now officially hit 7 billion and there has been a lotwritten about what this rapidly rising population means for the future of the world. Below are sme links to articles that will be useful for you and your studies.

Click here to be taken to The Guardian site where they have a large number of articles about the issue. You can enter your date of birth and find out the population of the world when you were born. There are some interactive maps and resources to help you understand what has happened and why.

Click here for a podcast about population growth, questioning whether lots of people is necessarily a bad thing

The BBC also has a large section on the world at 7 billion. Agains you can get an estimate of what umber person you are out of the 7 billion and read information about how they have calculated the population of the world and how we could control it.

Year 13 homework for Mr Bains (1st November 2011)

Read the article about Ghana and Ghana's energy needs and issue and makes notes on the following:

•Where are the main energy sources found?

•How large are the reserves?

•Are they energy secure?

•What energy related issues are there in Ghana?

This is due on Friday 4th November

Click on the headline to be taken to the article

Climate and Environmental issues to create migration issues in the future

Climate and other environmental changes will cause "major challenges" for world leaders over the next 50 years as mass migration threatens to create new humanitarian crises, a major new report says.
The report estimates there will be between 154 and 179 million people living in rural coastal floodplains by 2060 who will be unable to move away due to poverty

The government's chief scientist, Professor Sir John Beddington, who commissioned the study, said that environmental change would hit the world's poorest the hardest and that millions of them would inadvertently migrate toward, rather than away from, areas that are most vulnerable.

“We have assumed mass migration away from affected areas, but millions of people will also migrate into vulnerable areas and there will also be those who cannot migrate out,” John Beddington, chief scientific adviser to the British government, told reporters.
“They pose different challenges to the international community,” he added.
The United Nations estimates there were 210 million international migrants in 2010. A further 740 million were internal migrants in 2009.
An average 25 million people a year have been displaced due to weather-related events since 2008, which will likely rise as such events become more extreme and frequent, Beddington said

Click on the headline to be taken to an article from The Telegraph

Click on the photo to be taken to an article from the BBC

East Africa drought 'remains huge crisis'

Three months after famine was declared in Somalia, the scale of the crisis in the Horn of Africa remains huge, says a British official.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said hundreds of people, mainly children, were dying every day.

According to new figures cited by Mr Mitchell, British aid is feeding more than 2.4m people across the region.

The coming rainy season is expected to bring disease to crowded refugee camps.

In Somalia alone, Mr Mitchell points out, more than 400,000 children remain at risk of death.

Health has had a high priority in British aid that has come to the region - 1.3m people being vaccinated against measles, for example, while 400,000 doses of anti-malarial medication are currently on their way to Somalia.

Click on the headline to read the full story from the BBC

Click on the map to read a report and see more images from The Independent

Useful website for Life on the Margins (Unit 4, Year 13)

World Disasters Report 2011- Focus on hunger and malnutrition



This year’s World Disasters Report focuses on the growing crisis of hunger and malnutrition. Smallholder farmers who produce half the world’s food are among the almost 1 billion people who go to bed hungry every night. Millions of children suffer the irreversible effects of undernutrition. Increasing food insecurity weakens people’s resilience to disasters and disease, and people everywhere are experiencing the increasing volatility of food prices.


“ Hunger and malnutrition are the worst enemies of humankind. They deny to children – even at birth – an opportunity for the full expression of their innate genetic potential for physical and mental development. Freedom from hunger is the first requisite for sustainable human security. This will depend upon the productivity, profitability and sustainability of agriculture, as this edition of the World Disasters Report points out. Therefore, if food and nutrition policies go wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right."



– M. S. Swaminathan, an Indian MP

Click on the titleto be taken to the website where you can find the report