Food prices will remain high over the next decade even if they fall from current records, meaning millions more risk further hardship or hunger, the OECD and the UN's FAO food agency said in a report published on Thursday. Beyond stating the immediate need for humanitarian aid, the international bodies suggested wider deployment of genetically modified crops and a rethink of biofuel programmes that guzzle grain which could otherwise feed people and livestock.

Rich nations need to cut per-capita greenhouse gas emissions to India's current levels by mid-century to avoid devastating climate change, Britain's former chief scientific adviser said on Wednesday. Global carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from burning fossil fuels were already rising quickly and rich nations needed to quickly figure out how to maintain economic growth while committing to deep cuts in emissions, said David King.

US environmental advocates are nervous that record crude oil prices will lead to a boom in production of fossil fuels like motor fuel from coal, Canada's tar sands, or shale in Colorado that would emit more planet-warming gases than conventional oil. "High oil prices are a double-edged sword," said Deron Lovaas, an automobile expert at green group the Natural Resources Defence Council.

Carbon dioxide spewed by human activities has made ocean water so acidic that it is eating away at the shells and skeletons of starfish, coral, clams and other sea creatures, scientists said on Thursday. Marine researchers knew that ocean acidification, as it's called, was occurring in deep water far from land. What they called "truly astonishing" was the appearance of this damaging phenomenon on the Pacific North American continental shelf, stretching from Mexico to Canada.

THE idea that coal-fired electricity generation can continue to be the major contributor to global electricity generation and the world can still restrict carbon dioxide emissions to a level constant with holding climate warming below 2 degrees is a fairytale, according to letter in the premier science journal Nature (published online, May 7, 2008).

The time has come to look afresh at the management of the food economy in order to ensure food security---------

A campaign to plant trees worldwide set a goal on Tuesday of seven billion by late 2009, just over one for each person on the planet, to help protect the environment and slow climate change. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), an organiser of the tree planting drive begun in late 2006 with an initial goal of a billion by the end of 2007, said governments, companies and individuals had already pushed the total above 2 billion.

A corn-like plant that can grow as high as an elephant's eye on some of Earth's driest farmland shows promise as a "smart" biofuel that won't cut into world food supplies, an agriculture expert said on Monday. Sweet sorghum, used in the United States mostly as animal feed, offers a 10-foot (3 metre) stalk that can be turned into ethanol without damaging the food grain that grows at its top, Mark Winslow said in an interview.

"It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.' Thus might one summarise the predicament of international private petroleum Companies. There is hardly a drawing room conversation at which I am present where the comment is not made, "So you're raking it in', or the question asked "Where is the price of oil headed'?