Egypt’s fertile lands fed the Pharoahs, but a new report throws into doubt whether it can feed today’s 85 million strong population. It is no secret to Professor Mohamed Kassas that desertification is one of Egypt’s greatest environmental threats. But the United Nations recently removed all doubt on World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought […]
Looks ‘finger lickin good’; but how much arsenic is inside? Issues over whether the poison arsenic is being fed to commercial poultry in many countries, has now come to a head again with the USA’s Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA) has now admitted that amounts of the cancer causing poison arsenic is being fed to […]
The international aid and development organization Oxfam recently revealed some alarming facts and future predictions on world hunger, warning that the world faces a real crisis in agricultural production and nutrition, with climate change exacerbating the crisis. The Middle East is cited as a “taste of what may be to come” as rising food costs […]
Climate change will disrupt every aspect of life in the next few decades, including the kernel of Middle Eastern culture. A Middle East without nuts is like Belgium without chocolate: virtually impossible to imagine. But a recent report published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE (hat tip to Grist) shows that warm (and warming) countries […]
By 2100, at least ten billion people will devour the planet. At a recent film screening in Al Ain, one female student asked: “what’s the point of changing if nobody listens to us?” It is a powerful question and it is a powerful obstacle that becomes mute in the face of this: 10,000,000,000 (billion) people […]
Following the food riots that rocked the Middle East, Algeria is bolstering its agricultural self-sufficiency through irrigation projects and tax breaks for local producers Food security is a tricky topic to grasp because food doesn’t just rely on the water and sun it needs to grow but also on the price of oil, the right […]
Israeli idealists plan to develop a land trust in the northern Galilee to encourage rural homesteading. Despite its emergence as a developed, industrial country, Israel has a bevy of close-to-the-earth learning experiences to choose from. Several kibbutzim throughout the country offer a variety of useful workshops in permaculture, off-grid living, sustainable building, and organic farming. […]
Professor Mohammed Kassas in his office at Cairo University, photographed by Louise Sarant If Hassan Fathy is the Middle East’s father of sustainable architecture, then Mohamed Kassas is the prophet of desertification. The spry ninety year old Egyptian Professor of Botany told Almasry Alyoum that his love of nature sprouted in a fishing village along the […]
Scientists have discovered incidents of watermelon chlorotic stunt virus (WnCSV) in melons and watermelons in Jordan. Fewer cold spells are great for pests, but terrible for farmers. Last year, there were higher incidents of bed bugs in the UAE as a result of increasing temperatures and in October, Jordan’s tomato production was hampered by heat […]
The Ahmad Family in Egypt shows us what they eat. As popular uprisings continue to spread in Middle East, rising food costs for stable crops like rice and wheat cannot be ignored as underlying factors in the political unrest. In a region where Islam and anti-Westernism are usually blamed for driving populist politics, the impact […]
A banal for-profit product for the Third World may revolutionize the treatment of human waste In the Middle East and other regions with increasing water stress, using clean water to whisk excreta out of sight is increasingly wasteful. For the more than 40% of the world’s population that don’t have private toilets with running water, […]
With GMO beets likely to hit the US market, and their sugar to reach global markets, savvy eco-conscious consumers are going to have to pay extra attention to finding organic, non-engineered beets. One prevailing assumption about GMO foods is that if one country bans them, her citizens are safe. But a statement from Wenonah Hauter, […]
Climate change, peak oil and too many mouths to feed topples the first of the world’s now fragile economies. Egypt is just the first nation to see the instability predicted as a result of climate change, peak oil and the unsustainable numbers of people on this planet. But this is where we are all headed, […]
Despite this water fountain in Kurdistan, water there is scarce. This is not how poor Iraqis perceive their own shortages. We have long suspected that in the coming years, as climate change and population expansion put pressure on natural resources, conflicts will arise. The ongoing Egyptian protests demonstrate how repressed rage eventually surfaces when autocrats […]
Oil prices and food prices are interconnected. Wealthy Arab states try to create a food pipeline to stave off riots. As oil prices once again begin to climb past $100 a barrel as they did in 2008 so too, as in that oil price shock, food prices are rising, too. As then, there are now […]