Temperature Rising: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

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BBC, Under Criticism, Struggles to Tighten Its Belt

DAVID CAMERON, the British prime minister, was in Brussels meeting the press last October when he took a few moments to make fun of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

“Good to see that costs are being controlled everywhere,” Mr. Cameron said as he directed a mocking glance at three BBC correspondents, each from a different BBC program, covering his news conference.

The implication: Considering that the BBC has agreed to freeze most of its public funding for six years, effectively sentencing itself to a 16 percent budget cut through 2017, it surely could have looked harder at its staffing needs for the event.

“We’re all in this together,” Mr. Cameron said sarcastically, reciting his government’s favorite austerity slogan, and then added, “including, deliciously, the BBC.”

Why would the British premier celebrate the financial woes of the BBC? The corporation is the biggest, oldest and most revered public broadcasting company in the world, a centerpiece of the British brand, as essential to Britain’s view of itself as the National Health Service or the royal family.?

The BBC’s news broadcasts, whether on the radio or on television, exude authority and command respect around the globe. The corporation has also made extraordinary cultural contributions to Britain over the decades, through?nurturing? talent, sponsoring major musical events and broadcasting television shows like “I, Claudius,” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Fawlty Towers.” Britons call it, affectionately, the Beeb, and sometimes “Auntie,” for its traditional?role as the last word on everything.

But despite all that, or perhaps because of it, the BBC seems at times to be an all-purpose whipping boy, an easy target for casual joking and at times naked derision from the country’s political establishment.

As Mr. Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government embarks on a grueling austerity program, it has accused the BBC of “extraordinary and outrageous waste.” Media companies — especially those of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, the BBC’s chief competitor — have been quick to join the critical chorus.

Much of the criticism has to do with the license fee of ￡145.50 (about $240) that is levied annually on every British household with a television set. The fee brings in ￡3.6 billion a year, about 80 percent of the BBC’s total income.

The mandatory charge makes Britons feel, rightly, that they own the BBC, and emboldens them to complain loudly and often — as thousands did recently about a storyline in the soap opera “EastEnders.” In the show, a character whose baby dies of sudden infant death syndrome secretly swaps the body with her neighbor’s live baby. The writers rewrote the script so that she finally gives the baby back.

Just as Republicans in the United States have complained that National Public Radio has a left-wing bias, so do conservatives in Britain complain about the BBC’s political leanings. (A threat to remove NPR’s federal funding has remained only that so far.)

Members of Parliament are outraged at BBC executives’ high salaries, like the 2010 compensation package of ￡838,000, or about $1.4 million, for the director general, Mark Thompson; that total is set to drop to ￡619,000 this year. Its employees — it had more than 21,300 at the end of 2010 — are worried for their jobs, angry about a plan to relocate many of them from London to a suburb of Manchester, and unhappy about cuts in their pension plans.

The BBC’s many detractors, led by Mr. Murdoch’s corporation, say the licensing fee has allowed it “to get too big, too smug, too unanswerable,” as The Sun, a tabloid owned by Mr. Murdoch, declared in an editorial last year.

The BBC is not permitted to accept advertising for its broadcasting activities or Web sites within Britain, but it does accept ads and generates revenue through some of its international arms. Rivals complain that it behaves increasingly like a profit-making company, despite its public subsidy.

THE licensing fee is an anachronism, put in place in 1922, when the BBC was founded as a monopoly. Such was its reverence for the seriousness of its own mission, to “inform, educate and entertain,” that its news anchors habitually wore dinner jackets during radio broadcasts. It got its first television competitor, ITV, in the 1950s.

Today’s media landscape, with scores of television and radio channels available via satellite, cable or over the air, is unrecognizable from the one envisioned all those years ago. As those channels fight for audiences and advertising, the BBC’s guaranteed income is, more than ever, a source of envy.

“If you look at the dynamic marketplace that exists in this country, and someone came along and said, ‘This is a market that needs three and a half billion pounds’ worth of public intervention,’ they would be laughed out of court,” said Michael Grade, a former chairman of both the BBC and of ITV, the biggest commercial TV company in Britain. Like many Britons, both friends and foes of the BBC, Mr. Grade believes that the corporation has been allowed to grow too big and too unwieldy, offering too much to too many people.

Every week, more than 97 percent of the British population watches, reads or listens to something produced by the BBC, which operates 10 TV channels and 16 radio stations domestically. Through its World Service radio network, it has a weekly global audience of 180 million.

 

World Bank Faults Itself for East Timor’s Struggles

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WASHINGTON — A frank evaluation by the World Bank’s internal auditors of a decade of efforts to help East Timor underscores the challenges facing international organizations trying to assist struggling nations.

The draft report, not yet released publicly, assigns much of the blame for slow progress in East Timor, which emerged in 1999 after a quarter-century struggle for independence from Indonesia, to the World Bank itself.

But it also illustrates the problems that arise as development agencies try to meet urgent needs while ensuring that donors’ money is not misspent.

The review by the auditors, the Independent Evaluation Group, which reports directly to World Bank directors, covers the period from 2000 to 2010. Among its findings are that the bank delayed the opening of four desperately needed hospitals for a year because it adhered too rigidly to its own procurement rules, even though East Timor’s child mortality rate was among the highest in Southeast Asia and life expectancy was barely over 55.

The report also says efforts to support education were unsatisfactory. The bank did help build and repair schools. But at the request of the new government, which was trying to dismantle the Indonesian education system, it distributed teaching materials in Portuguese, which had been the main language of instruction before the Indonesian occupation, when Timor was a Portuguese colony.

The new government restored Portuguese as an official language along with Tetum, an indigenous language. But Portuguese was spoken by only 5 percent of the population, and few younger teachers could understand the materials.

It might have been more useful, the report says, to have developed texts in English or indigenous languages.

One result, the bank’s report says, was that by 2009, more than 70 percent of the students tested at the end of the first grade “could not read a single word” of a simple text in Portuguese, “a dismal record after 10 years of efforts.”

The report asserts that at the urging of the bank — which provides loans to developing countries with the explicit goal of fighting poverty — East Timor saved too much of its petroleum revenues rather than spend them on social projects, an approach that contributed to high levels of poverty.

Poverty in East Timor, already at a rate twice that of Indonesia’s level, “rose significantly through most of the evaluation period and declined only after 2007, when the government, against bank advice, increased its spending using petroleum resources,” the report states.

Ferid Belhaj, the World Bank’s director for East Timor, said it was against the bank’s policy to comment on an evaluation that was not final. But he said the country had made “tremendous progress” in the past decade, building or rehabilitating 637 schools and helping to increase life expectancy to 61 in 2008, from 56 in 2000.

When East Timor became independent, an estimated 70 percent of its economic infrastructure had been destroyed in years of fighting.

“It’s a lot easier to look backwards,” said Scott Guggenheim, a former World Bank adviser who worked in East Timor. “The country had been burned down. You had half the population in refugee camps.”

Difficult compromises are often necessary, specialists say.

“You are going to want to try to move as quickly as possible, even though you recognize that maybe some things are going to be used less efficiently,” said Michael Morfit, a professor at Georgetown University who worked in Indonesia for the United States Agency for International Development. “You just accept that as the trade-off.”

The case of the Portuguese school texts in East Timor poses a somewhat different challenge: knowing when to resist policies if they seem ill advised.