For those who might not know, following a week after the Russia-Ukraine wheat embargo, there are even bigger and ominous signs hinting at global food insecurity and the catastrophic agricultural crises coming our way.
India last week banned export on all non-basmati rice varieties.
I repeat: EXPORT BAN ON ALL non-basmati RICE varieties.
[Aside: export of basmati variety will continue, the demand for which is relatively small in India when compared to the nearly 15 major varieties of rice (it's home to at least a 1000 varieties) consumed by very large populations everyday(these are the ones which are now banned). Basmati is a "festive" and only occasionally consumed variety in India. It is largely exported to the richer nations, many of whom think it is the only variety of rice from India.]
Why is India banning rice now?
Answer: global warming.
What’s happening in India (and South Asia at large) should both terrify you and wake you up
Here’s more (facts? trivia? bothersome news? how the world actually works?).
With erratic monsoons now a regular feature, intense floods are followed immediately by heatwaves that have caused the entire agriculture cycle to go haywire, crop yields to plummet, and near droughts across all major food basket regions in India.
Tamilnadu, my home state, used to be rice-country, historically recorded by both the Tamils and later the Brits as giving three harvests a year. Now it is barely struggling to give a single harvest.
West Bengal, one of the largest rice producers has reported highest levels of aridity in its arable lands.
Punjab, and Haryana, the heartlands of most agriculture have had multiple crop collapses, the worst top soil degradation because of intensive practices, and fertilizer polluted irrigation ways (not to mention the highest levels of cancer).
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states, and heavily reliant on agriculture as both economy and livelihood have had one of the worst years on record for yields on almost all food crops.
Riverbeds, lakes, and canals that depend almost exclusively on the monsoons are drying up.
All across the country, groundwater has plummeted and deep wells are now dug that reach waters from a few million years back.
I’m seeing folks from #Sudan on #twitter despairing that the site’s new limits, and its general m*sk-era brokenness, will compromise their ability to stay updated on the catastrophe unfolding in their homeland and share emergency info.
Once more: mastodon/fediverse needs to think seriously about how to expand to users in Asia and Africa and how to handle emergencies #twitterdown
@Mina@wigbert@abshlimon discoverability on mastodon is a real issue, especially if you are on a small instance or not a celebrity. Hashtags only help so much.
My house flooded THRICE in a WEEK. My block had a gastroenteritis outbreak because of it. I had to take my Dad to the ER because I was too ill to treat him at home myself
Before that? Flooded once two YEARS ago
More than SIX years after the last one
HUNDREDS are DEAD across #Pakistan#India, bt thats "TYPICAL"?
"Supplies of drinking #water in the Indian capital will fall by a quarter on Thursday and Friday because three treatment plants have been flooded, the city government said, as the #Yamuna river overflowed after incessant #rain."
@nikikursalow Welcome to Paktodon.Asia, the first Pakistani mastodon instance!
Heres some tips for you to get started, feel free to ask around for helpful, its a very nice community here. #WelcomeWednesday
You must be using either the Tusky app on android, a web browser on a pc, or any other third-party app; the official mastodon app has very limited features:
"This is not a climate dispatch. It is just a recounting of some of the terrors the month of June brought us. One month. That’s it. And it truly is the stuff of nightmares."
"#ClimateChange-induced #downpours, #drought, and soaring temperatures have become increasingly common across the eight countries of #SouthAsia, making it one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to the impacts of #GlobalWarming."
"..cities in #Punjab are expected to receive spells of heavy rain today and tomorrow, while #Chenab and #Ravi rivers will be flooded due to an incessant downpour in #India’s northern states, which has increased the water discharge towards downstream areas."
"The #monsoon which started on June 25 has so far resulted in the death of 80 people while 142 were injured..."
I'm looking for collaborators to pull together map data related to tribal / #Adivasi communities in #SouthAsia and have that added to the Native-Land.ca project.
I have some analog maps to start with like the one below. It's going to take some work to translate these to GIS!
If you have either subject-area expertise or technical expertise (i.e., translating analog maps--> #GIS), I would love to hear from you...