International News

2022 Global Food Security Index (GFSI) Report

Why in News

The 2022 Global Food Security Index (GFSI) report was released by the British weekly The Economist. The 11th Global Food Security Index shows a deterioration in the global food environment for the third year, threatening food security. In this report, South Africa overtook Tunisia to become the most food-secure country in Africa.

Key Points

Vulnerability to Shocks: The global food environment is deteriorating, making it vulnerable to shocks. Significant progress was made in global food security from 2012 to 2015, with the overall GFSI score increasing by 6 percent. However, structural challenges have caused the growth of the global food system to slow down. The past 3 years witnessed a reversal in the global trend of the overall food security environment.

Affordability: In 2022, the GFSI suffered because of the plummeting of two of its strongest pillars – affordability, and quality and safety. The weakness in the other two pillars (availability, and sustainability and adaptation) continued during this year. Affordability (top-scoring pillar) was dragged down mainly because of the sharp rise in food inflation, declining freedom of trade and reduced funding for food safety nets.

Widening food security gap: In 2022, 8 of the top 10 performing countries are in Europe, with Finland topping the list with a score of 83.7. It is followed by Ireland (scoring 81.7) and Norway (scoring 80.5). These countries have received high scores on all 4 pillars of the GFSI. The non-European countries in the top 10 list are Japan and Canada. The difference between the top-performing countries and countries at the lower rank has been widening since 2019, revealing the inequity in the global food system.

Africa’s Most Food-Secure Country: South Africa, at the 59th position, was recognized as the most food-secure country in Africa. It made a record leap from the 70th rank in 2021. This comes despite the various global challenges to the country’s agriculture sectir, like climate change, the fertilizer crisis caused by the Ukraine war, inflation, etc. This is the first time that a country in Sub-Saharan Africa was the top performer in the continent. The second-best performing country in Africa is Tunisia at the 62nd position.

Global Food Security Index & India:

India is ranked at 68th position along with Algeria with the overall score of 58.9. China’s position is at 25th with the score of 74.2.

India was ranked at 71st position in the Global Food Security (GFS) Index 2021 of 113 countries with an overall score of 57.2 points on the GFS Index 2021.

A book titled “The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times” by Michelle Obama

Why In News

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times is a nonfiction book written by Michelle Obama and published, by Crown Publishing.

Key Points
 
The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times is a nonfiction book written by Michelle Obama and published, by Crown Publishing. The Light We Carry will inspire readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world. The author “shares the contents of her ‘personal toolbox’ – the habits and practices, attitudes and beliefs, and even physical objects that she uses to overcome her feelings of fear, helplessness and self doubt.”

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times has generally received positive reviews by book critics for herself on biography. In The Light We Carry, the former First Lady shares her practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world. A mother, daughter, spouse and friend, she shares fresh stories, her insightful reflections on change and the earned wisdom that helps her continue to “become.” With her trademark humour, candour, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.

Indian-origin Leo Varadkar is new Prime Minister of Ireland

Why In News

Indian-origin Leo Varadkar has returned for a second term as Ireland’s Prime Minister as part of a job-sharing deal made by the country’s centrist coalition government.

Key Points

Indian-origin Leo Varadkar has returned for a second term as Ireland’s Prime Minister as part of a job-sharing deal made by the country’s centrist coalition government. His appointment was confirmed when he received the seal of office from President Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s head of state.

This is the second time that Varadkar has been elected as Irish prime minister. He first became the Irish prime minister in June 2017. In June 2020, the Fine Gael party led by Varadkar formed a coalition government with Fianna Fail and Green Party, in which he served as deputy prime minister and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

According to an agreement reached by the three parties in setting up a coalition government, Fianna Fail party leader Micheal Martin will first serve as Irish prime minister until December 2022 and Fine Gael party leader Varadkar will replace Martin to be the new prime minister until the five-year term of the current government comes to an end.

Varadkar’s rise to the top of Irish politics was remarkable in a country dominated by a strict, conservative Catholic morality well into the latter half of the last century. At 38, he became the country’s youngest Taoiseach as well as its first openly gay head of government and first of Indian heritage.

Varadkar was born in Dublin to an Irish mother who worked as a nurse and an Indian immigrant father, who was a qualified doctor.
At the age of seven, a precocious Varadkar is reported to have told his mother’s friends that he wanted to be the minister for health. After gaining a medical degree from Trinity College Dublin, he went into general practice but stayed involved in politics, and in 2007 secured election for Fine Gael in Dublin West. In 2015, before Ireland’s referendum legalising same-sex marriage, Varadkar came out publicly as gay.

On Brexit, Varadkar was credited in 2019 with former UK prime minister Boris Johnson for breaking the deadlock on Northern Ireland. But a resulting deal — which effectively keeps the UK-run province within the European single market and customs union — remains a point of tension between Brussels and London.

Harvard University named Claudine Gay as first black president

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Harvard University named Claudine Gay, a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, as its new president, the first African American to hold the post at the prestigious university.

Key Points

 Harvard University named Claudine Gay, a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, as its new president, the first African American to hold the post at the prestigious university. Gay, 52, is just the second woman to be elected to head the school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, will take over as the university’s 30th president on July 1, 2023.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Gay graduated from Stanford and then earned her Ph.D. in government at Harvard in 1998, winning the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.

Gay was elected to the presidency by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s principal governing board.

She will be succeeding current Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, who announced he was retiring in June after five years at the helm. His predecessor, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, was the first woman to serve as Harvard president since its founding in 1636.

NASA Launches International Mission ‘SWOT’ to Survey Earth’s Water

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) have jointly launched the SWOT spacecraft.

Key Points

 
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) have jointly launched the newest Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft to track nearly all the water on the surface of the Earth. It was launched atop a SpaceX rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. It will remain operational for 3 years.

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is a satellite altimeter jointly developed and operated by NASA and CNES (French space agency) in partnership with the space agencies of the UK and Canada.

The mission’s objective is to make the world’s first-ever global survey of the Earth’s surface water, capable of observing the finer details of the ocean surface topography and measuring the changes in the terrestrial surface water bodies.

As it uses wide-swath of altimetry technology, the mission will be capable of almost completely observing the world’s oceans and freshwater bodies with repeated high-resolution elevation measurements.

It will provide the first truly global observation of the changes in water levels, stream slopes and inundation extents in rivers, lakes and floodplains.

The satellite can measure the height of water in freshwater bodies and the ocean on more than 90 percent of the Earth’s surface.

It can also observe ocean circulation at unprecedented scales of 15 to 25 km, which is an order of magnitude that is finer than current satellites.

The information obtained from this mission can be used to understand the ocean’s influence in climate change, impact of global warming on the waterbodies, and the preparedness of communities for disasters like floods and droughts.

The satellite will start collecting data in around six months after undergoing a series of checks and calibrations.

Once operational, it will cover the entire Earth’s surface between 78 degrees south and 78 degrees north latitude at least once every 21 days. It will send back some 1 terabyte of unprocessed data each day.

It is equipped with an instrument called the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn), which bounces radar pulses off the surface of the water and receives the return signal using 2 antennas on either side of the spacecraft.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):

It is an American government’s premier space agency which was set up in 1958 to promote research and development in the exploration of outer space and Earth’s atmosphere. NASA mainly launches its rockets from its two primary spaceports. One is John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida, United States and from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, United States of America.