With soaring food prices expected to continue for the foreseeable future, the World Bank is calling for a “new deal” of long-term measures, ranging from increased investment in African agriculture to genetically engineering fuel-producing plants.

Aid organisations are already confronting growing financial shortfalls in their struggle to feed the world’s hungry as food prices have exploded over the past six months, propelled by increased demand from newly prosperous Asian countries like China, rising fuel prices and the diversion of land from food crops to bio-fuel production.

The problem extends way beyond usual temporary production blips like the recent Australian drought, the volatility of soaring oil prices and a falling dollar, and could be severely compounded by climate change - with harsher droughts in some parts of the world and more severe flooding in others predicted.

In a worst case scenario not only could mortality and disease from malnutrition, already the underlying cause of an estimated 3.5 million child deaths each year, soar, but widespread social and political unrest might erupt. Food riots have already been reported in several countries and the World Bank estimates that 33 nations face potential social unrest.

“For these countries, where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption [spending], there is no margin for survival,” World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick told the Center for Global Development in Washington on 2 April, calling for a "new deal" combining hundreds of millions of additional dollars for immediate relief with long-term efforts to boost agricultural productivity in developing countries.

He announced that the Bank would nearly double agricultural assistance to US$800 million in Africa, adding: “We can help create a ‘Green Revolution’ for sub-Saharan Africa.”

Just last month the UN World Food Programme (WFP) issued an “extraordinary emergency appeal” to world government leaders, endorsed by Zoellick yesterday, for an additional $500 million over the $2.9 billion it sought a few months ago, just to feed the same 73 million people in 78 countries.

Policy questions

For some the World Bank’s “new deal,” which follows up on the conclusions of a report last year, has been too slow in coming. “The World Bank, I would say very belatedly, acknowledged the importance of the agricultural sector,” Tom Arnold, chief executive of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Concern Worldwide, which seeks to reduce suffering in the poorest countries, told IRIN.

“Immediately, there needs to be a recognition that if we are to have some kind of international safety net in place for the most vulnerable people on the planet, then responding positively to something like WFP is an important aspect,” he said.

“For the longer term, there are a lot of big policy questions that need to be addressed both nationally and internationally, such as taking agriculture more seriously in the economic sector... Any short-term measures to alleviate the problem have to go hand in hand with a serious and strategic commitment to promoting agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Other NGOs agree. “For the recent couple of decades donors, including countries like the United States, have been quite dramatically neglecting the agricultural sector, reducing their funding support for agricultural programmes,” Oxfam America Policy Director Gawain Kripke told IRIN.

“The food aid system is quite broken and needs reform, and urgently needs it, because dollars are being wasted quite dramatically. We need to be thinking about less short-term palliative responses and longer-term security responses,” he said.

Avoiding high transport costs

The NGO Action Against Hunger (AAH) calls for building capacity in Africa through access to credit, agricultural extension programmes and training, citing the continent’s untapped potential and the need to avoid the high transportation costs as oil prices soar.

“The transport costs associated with food aid could be better used to improve local production techniques and agricultural systems,” AAH Food Security Adviser Silke Pietzsch told IRIN.

Oxfam America’s Kripke cited US insistence that all US food aid be purchased in the US and shipped mostly on US-flagged carriers as a major barrier, greatly increasing costs and entailing delays of up to six months.

“The cost increment of doing it that way rather than buying food more flexibly for instance in Africa for distribution in Africa, can be 50 percent,” he said. “So we can get a lot more assistance from the same amount of money if the United States were to reform how it did its food assistance.”

GM crops

Siwa Msangi, research fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), believes bio-technology holds the solution and that genetically mutated crops need to be de-demonised.

“Biotechnologies can help us grow more drought-resistant, pest-resistant, disease-resistant traits in staple crops,” he told IRIN. This could counter climate change by, for example, producing submergence-resistant strains to withstand increased flooding.

“There are certain attitudes to technologies in food that I think we need to overcome through better education,” he said, citing the prejudices against so-called franken-foods and franken-fish and noting that farmers in Africa are afraid to use bio-technologies that might reduce their competitiveness on the European market due to attitudes there.

But for some there is at present no clear way ahead. Jim Bishop, president for Humanitarian Policy and Practice of InterAction, a US-based coalition of non-profit organisations, said US groups and international agencies like the WFP are still trying “to come to grips” with how to respond adequately.

“The longer term prospects are not terribly encouraging,” he told IRIN. “No one has come up with an agreed answer to the problem. There obviously isn’t a silver bullet, and there’ll be various views, and we hope that the international community will contribute additional resources.”

Bio-fuels and biotechnology

Nobel economics prize winner and former World Bank chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz sees bio-fuels as a major culprit. “The market has been distorted badly by some of the bio-fuel requirements,” he told IRIN. “The whole system is affected by this very large withdrawal of agricultural output that was going into food production.”

But this is where biotechnology could come to the rescue, according IFPRI’s Msangi. “We should be aiming for high yielding varieties both for food and for fuel as well,” he said, foreseeing a switch to grasses, and to using the stock instead of the grain of maize for fuel.

Meanwhile the immediate problem remains. Zoellick called for immediate action on WFP’s new appeal. “The United States, the European Union, Japan, and other OECD [the 30-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries must act now to fill this gap - or many more people will suffer and starve,” he warned.

USAID announced in February that its food aid costs had jumped 41 percent in the first half of the US 2008 financial year, swallowing $120 million.

Another donor, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), this fiscal year has already provided over $116 million to WFP. “The Government of Canada is concerned by the impact that the rising price of food commodities will have on the world’s vulnerable and hungry people,” CIDA spokeswoman Jo-Ann Purcell told IRIN. “We will continue to follow WFP needs closely and make every effort possible to respond to the increased demands for food aid.”

WFP continues to call attention to the plight of the one billion people who still live on less than $1 a day, the threshold defined by the international community as absolute poverty, below which survival is in question.

“The crunch means that families which may have had a bit of money to pay school fees for their children, to go to clinics when they are sick, or take much-needed nourishing food together with anti-retroviral drugs, will suffer as they will cut back in these areas,” it said in a recent update. “They will also start cutting meals and substituting less nutritious foods.”

Since 2005, the sales of laptops have displaced those of desktop PCs in the United States.

Due a constant drop in price rapid technical improvements and the swift evolution and extension of the WAN technology, notebooks are destined to replace desktops in most areas both professionally and at home.

Laptops will account for more than half of the worldwide PC shipments by 2011, according to a new report by IDC.

According to the Gartner Group, worldwide some 257.1 million PCs will ship this year, and 60 percent of them will be desktops. PC growth for 2007 should be around 7% while laptops will grow by 18.6% and will continue to maintain a double digit growth at least until 2010. Desktop sales are still strong in the EMEA and Latin America with about 60% of all shipments.

In more mature markets notebooks have taken over and continue to grow at a much faster pace. This would hardly shocking news.

Notebooks take up much less space than desktops, they're portable, and given their relatively low cost compared to a few years ago, you can just buy a new one when you decide you want to upgrade.

Specific reasons of the evolution from desktop to laptop:

- Price: While laptops are still more expensive than desktops for the same power/capacity, the gap is constantly narrowing. In 2000 you could expect to pay almost double for a laptop comparable to average desktop priced around $1,000. In 2007, you can expect a $300 to $500 difference depending on brands.

- Power: The same applies here. Even in the early 2000s, any heavy database user or serious gamer would not hesitate one second in between a desktop or a laptop. While there is still an advantage for desktop, this barrier has come down drastically; in fact many IT departments have migrated to laptops and only the most serious queries are run on servers. The same applies to gamers where only the most demanding games need to be run on the most advanced desktop. For the average user using office and going online the desktop have no specific advantages

- WiFi/Portability: The explosion of wifi spots is a decisive factor that explains the migration to laptops. Years ago, laptops where generally used because you could take them with you when traveling, nowadays in many areas you can work while traveling (airports, trains, restaurants, coffee shops…) are among the location where you can actually go online at a very comfortable speed. You can even use such tool as Skype with a wireless laptop and have video conference anywhere you have WiFi access.

In addition, laptops are continually getting lighter and screen sizes bigger. Most new laptops come with 17 inch screens and weigh under 7 pounds. Those with 15 inch monitors generally weigh under 5 pounds. You can buy them new starting below $400…

The desktop will not go away anytime soon, they will slowly evolve in a different market demand such as Media PC environment (TV tuner, DVR, radio, music) for the home or used as back up device for your laptop. Chances are that when it is time to replace your DVD player you will may buy a PC and you will also get use to download TV shows on your computer and watch them on your TV.

What’s next for laptops?

- On one hand they will continue to improve in the traditional “way” catching up with the desktops in term of power and capacity and slowly replacing desktop for most needs.

- Another aspect is the extra portability evolution already underway with mini laptops, palmtops, tablet PCs and touch screen laptops. Combining extreme portability and WiFi, these mini laptops will replace gradually paper and pads, order sheets, notebooks and others... As you write or type any information on your mini laptop (orders, notes, drawings, questionnaires….) you have the ability to immediately save, sync or communicate the results.

About the Author:
Christophe Catesson - Communication Manager for http://www.bestlaptopsreviews.com . Laptop and notebook information reviews and ratings, most popular laptops, industry news.