The 2012 GHI report focuses particularly on the issue of how to ensure sustainable food security under conditions of water, land, and energy stress. Demographic changes, rising incomes and associated consumption patterns, and climate change, alongside persistent poverty and inadequate policies and institutions, are all placing serious pressure on natural resources.In this report, IFPRI describes the evidence on land, water, and energy scarcity in developing countries and offers two visions of a future global food system - an unsustainable scenario in which current trends in resource use continue, and a sustainable scenario in which access to food, modern energy, and clean water improves significantly and ecosystem degradation is halted or reversed. Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe provide on-the-ground perspectives on the issues of land tenure and title as well as the impacts of scarce land, water, and energy on poor people in Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy consumption of three methods used to produce animal feed from concentrated rice-washing water (CRW) and disposing of the rice-washing water through wastewater treatment. Four scenarios were compared using LCA: (i) producing concentrated liquid feed by centrifugation (CC) of CRW with wastewater treatment and discharge of the supernatant, (ii) producing concentrated liquid feed by heating evaporation (HC) of CRW, (iii) producing dehydrated feed by dehydration (DH) of CRW, and (iv) wastewater treatment and discharge of nonconcentrated rice-washing water (WT). The functional unit (FU) was defined as 1 metric ton of rice washed for cooking or processing. Our results suggested that the energy consumptions of CC, HC, DH, and WT were 108, 322, 739, and 242 MJ per FU, respectively, and the amounts of GHG emissions from CC, HC, DH, and WT were 6.4, 15.8, 45.5, and 22.5 kg of CO₂ equivalents per FU, respectively. When the produced feed prepared from CRW was assumed to be transported 200 km to farms, CC and HC still emitted smaller GHGs than the other scenarios, and CC consumed the smallest amount of energy among the scenarios. The present study indicates that liquid feed production from CRW by centrifugation has a remarkably reduced environmental impact compared with the wastewater treatment and discharge of rice-washing water.

World hunger, according to the 2012 Global Hunger Index (GHI), has declined somewhat since 1990 but remains “serious.” The global average masks dramatic differences among regions and countries. Regionally, the highest GHI scores are in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. South Asia reduced its GHI score significantly between 1990 and 1996—mainly by reducing the share of underweight children— but could not maintain this rapid progress. Though Sub-Saharan Africa made less progress than South Asia in the 1990s, it has caught up since the turn of the millennium, with its 2012 GHI score falling below that of South Asia. From the 1990 GHI to the 2012 GHI, 15 countries reduced their scores by 50 percent or more. In terms of absolute progress, between the 1990 GHI and the 2012 GHI, Angola, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nicaragua, Niger, and Vietnam saw the largest improvements in their scores. Twenty countries still have levels of hunger that are “extremely alarming” or “alarming.” Most of the countries with alarming GHI scores are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (the 2012 GHI does not, however, reflect the recent crisis in the Horn of Africa, which intensified in 2011, or the uncertain food situation in the Sahel). Two of the three countries with extremely alarming 2012 GHI scores—Burundi and Eritrea—are in Sub-Saharan Africa; the third country with an extremely alarming score is Haiti. Its GHI score fell by about one quarter from 1990 to 2001, but most of this improvement was reversed in subsequent years. The devastating January 2010 earthquake, although not yet fully captured by the 2012 GHI because of insufficient availability of recent data, pushed Haiti back into the category of “extremely alarming.” In contrast to recent years, the Democratic Republic of Congo is not listed as “extremely alarming,” because insufficient data are available to calculate the country’s GHI score. Current and reliable data are urgently needed to appraise the situation in the country.

The current study was designed to examine the effects of intracerebroventricular injections of SHU9119 [a nonselective melanocortin receptor (McR) antagonist] and MCL0020 (a selective McR antagonist) on the serotonin-induced eating and drinking responses of broiler cockerels deprived of food for 24 h (FD24). For Experiment 1, the chickens were intracerebroventricularly injected with 2.5, 5, and 10 ㎍ serotonin. In Experiment 2, the chickens received 2 nmol SHU9119 before being injected with 10 ㎍ serotonin. For Experiment 3, the chickens were given 10 ㎍ serotonin after receiving 2 nmol MCL0020, and the level of food and water intake was determined 3 h post-injection. Results of this study showed that serotonin decreased food intake but increased water intake among the FD24 broiler cockerels and that these effects occurred in a dose-dependent manner. The inhibitory effect of serotonin on food intake was significantly attenuated by pretreatment with SHU9119 and MCL0020. However, the stimulatory effect of serotonin on water intake was not altered by this pretreatment. These results suggest that serotonin hypophagia and hyperdipsia were mediated by different mechanisms in the central nervous system, and that serotonin required downstream activation of McRs to promote hypophagia but not hyperdipsia in the FD24 chickens.

En 45 ovinos machos Santa Inés (peso vivo medio de 27,50 ± 0, 48 kg) se evaluó el consumo de agua, al consumir raciones con niveles crecientes (0, 25, 50, 75, 100%) de nopal (Opuntia fícus indica Mill) en sustitución al maíz molido. El diseño fue en bloques al azar con nueve repeticiones. El consumo de materia seca respondió de modo cuadrático, perjudicando el peso final, que disminuyó, con el aumento del nopal en la dieta. Aumentó el consumo de materia natural disminuyendo el de agua, el consumo total de agua aumentó en el tratamiento con mayor cantidad de nopal. La relación de consumos: agua voluntaria/ materia seca, disminuyó al aumentar el nopal. El nopal constituye una reserva de agua para ovinos Santa Inés en condiciones semiáridas de Brasil. | The water intake in 45 male (27.50 ± 0.48 kg of mena body weight) Santa Ines sheep fed with increasing levels (0, 25, 50, 75, 100% DM basis) of prickly pear (Opuntia ficus indica Mill) to replace corn was studied. A completely randomized block design with nine replications per treatment was used. Quadratic behavior was observed for the intake of dry matter, hitting the final weight, which decreased with increasing the cactus in the diet. There was an increase in the intake of natural material and a decrease in voluntary water intake; total water intake increased, and the ratio of intakes: water/dry matter, decreased in the treatment with larger cactus proportion. The pryckly pear constitues a water reservoir for Santa Inês sheep in Brazilian semiarid conditions.

En 45 ovinos machos Santa Inés (peso vivo medio de 27,50 ± 0, 48 kg) se evaluó el consumo de agua, al consumir raciones con niveles crecientes (0, 25, 50, 75, 100%) de nopal (Opuntia fícus indica Mill) en sustitución al maíz molido. El diseño fue en bloques al azar con nueve repeticiones. El consumo de materia seca respondió de modo cuadrático, perjudicando el peso final, que disminuyó, con el aumento del nopal en la dieta. Aumentó el consumo de materia natural disminuyendo el de agua, el consumo total de agua aumentó en el tratamiento con mayor cantidad de nopal. La relación de consumos: agua voluntaria/ materia seca, disminuyó al aumentar el nopal. El nopal constituye una reserva de agua para ovinos Santa Inés en condiciones semiáridas de Brasil.

Since the 1990s, children of the Gbagyi tribe in Northern Nigeria have been suffering severe rickets with an incidence of up to 40% in the children’s generation. The disease seems to be prevalent in an area of approximately 100 km2 south-east of Kaduna. According to broad medical studies in that area, there is no evidence for a genetic disposition but for a nutritional cause of the disease. A lack of calcium was found in blood and was calculated to originate from diet. We therefore checked parent material, soil, maize cobs (Zea mays) and drinking water for their specific Ca contents from a region with rickets problem (study area A) and compared the results to Ca amounts in similar samples from a region where rickets is unknown among the Gbagyi population (study area B). It thereby became apparent that there are no differences in mineralogical composition of the parent material between the study areas, but that Ca contents in soil, maize cobs and drinking water are 47.6%, 26.6%, respectively, 79.1% lower in study area A compared to study area B. This result suggests that there may indeed be a nutritionally and/or environmentally influence on rickets disease. Nevertheless, further research on this topic is required.

It is well known that immune defenses of bivalves against environmental and pathogenic stresses are primarily attributable to hemocytes. Hemocyte parameters are being used progressively as indicators to assess the host immune status. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that seasonal variations on the immune status have two origins: exogenous and endogenous. In this work, we investigated the effects of seasonal exogenous (water temperature and food availability) and endogenous (size and reproduction) factors on the hemocyte parameters in the scallop Chlamys farreri. Scallops were monthly collected from February to December 2009 at 2 sampling sites differing in culture mode: Qingdao for monoculture and Weihai for scallop—kelp polyculture. Six hemocyte parameters including total hemocyte count (THC), granulocyte percentage (GP), intrahemocytic phenoloxidase (PO), acid phosphatase (ACP), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and peroxidase (POD) were analyzed. Results illustrated that all hemocyte parameters exhibited marked seasonal variations, following a similar pattern at both sites. High values of THC, GP, PO, and POD were observed in spring and early summer, a period of favorable water temperature and high food availability and gonad index, whereas low values were found in summer and early autumn, a period corresponding to reproduction completion and high water temperature. Moreover, SOD was lowest in February and highest in August, and correlated positively with water temperature. Hemocyte parameters in the scallop C. farreri varied greatly among seasons, and their values were generally low during summer and early autumn, suggesting that scallops had a depressed immune status during this period.

Food colorants are an important class of food additives that give the first impression to consumers about the quality of food. Ce(IV)-reducing antioxidant capacity assay originally developed in our laboratories was adapted to the determination of synthetic food colorants for the first time. This method allowing for total antioxidant capacity assay of dietary polyphenols, flavonoids, and ascorbic acid in plant extracts is based on the room temperature oxidation of antioxidant compounds with Ce(IV) sulfate in dilute H2SO4 solution and measurement of the absorbance of unreacted Ce(IV) at 320 nm. The results of the proposed method were correlated with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) findings. Individual standard solutions, synthetic mixtures of synthetic colorants, and colorant extracts were identified and quantified with HPLC on a C18 column equipped with a diode array detector, and slight modifications on the existing HPLC method were made to analyze synthetic colorant mixtures. This work proposes Ce(IV)-oxidative spectrophotometry as a complementary technique to HPLC in the analysis of food colorants.