The United States, Canada, South Africa, and India are all suffering drought and livestock and agricultural disasters this year, as rain has failed, and the monsoons have not come to India. Australian drought is also the worst in recorded history with Australian farmers and ranchers suffering the driest winter since the 1930s. Australian ranchers are trying to get rid of cattle since the pastures are destroyed, but the market is swamped and the cattle are unhealthy, undernourished and in poor shape so prices are low.
Like Canada and the United States, Italy has suffered a plague of locusts in recent weeks, as the insects flew over from the northern Sahara, crossing the Mediternnean to feed on the tomatoes and other produce of Italy. Parts of Italy are also in dire straights due to terrible drought. Lakes and reservoirs are drying and in Sicily photographs reveal a land severely dry with the ground cracked and hardened. Residents are hoarding water, and their are complaints that the disaster is intensified by human actions, including bad water management over the years.
Meanwhile, after Alberta farmers received over 300 million dollars in provincial aid to help them survive the worst drought recorded in 133 years of record keeping, Saskatchewan farmers are glum after receiving payments of 25 dollars per cow. The Saskatchewan government is claiming poverty and a genuine inability to pay any more, and given that Alberta is the oil rich part of the west, and the Saskatchewan economy is dependant on Agriculture this could be true. However the government is releasing early about 150 million dollars in crop insurance payments, but farmers and ranchers are unhappy that there is no extra money. The federal government proposed a system of matching payments, which the Saskatchewan government complained was impossible for them to match, and farmers are also upset that, as they put it, in the midst of the disaster the Federal government is ' no where to be seen.' Meanwhile Alberta is holding a lottery for some hay being shipped west from Ontario, and with thousands of desperate cattle producers entered into the lottery, there will only be 25 winners.
For those who are thinking 'CO2' and 'Kyoto' I thought I would mention that the Kyoto accord calls for reductions of 6 per cent and that stretching out over many years, so if you believe that CO2 is the problem Kyoto is hardly the answer. As well the ocean is the largest sink of CO2 on the planet, which the majority of the CO2 present trapped in sediments on the ocean floor. However, as ice ages illustrate, when the ocean sinks to much CO2, the planet goes into a deep freeze, the ocean surface shrinks due to ice cover, giving CO2 time to build up through plant decay and forest fires, warming the planet that all important couple of degrees, and melting the ice. It then takes thousands, even tens of thousands of years for the ocean to sink enough CO2 to cause another ice age (as well as thousands, even tens of thousands of years to build up enough CO2 to end an ice age) and so the CO2 cycle is very slow, and so if CO2 is the problem, you can look forward to living with the results for thousands of years.