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“This year’s drought is unprecedented, causing food shortages on a scale we have never seen here before,” said Dr. Michael Charles, Head of the International Federation of the Red Cross’ Southern Africa cluster in a public statement. “We are seeing people going two to three days without food, entire herds of livestock wiped out by drought and small-scale farmers with no means to earn money to tide them over a lean season.”

Families hit by the deadly threat of famine can find some support in relief agencies, but as the World Food Programme (WFP) has made quite clear, this level of need will overwhelm relief capacity.

“As things stand, we will run out of food by [the] end of February, coinciding with the peak of the hunger season – when needs are at their highest,” said Niels Balzer, WFP’s Deputy Country Director in Zimbabwe in one statement.

Trees for the Future Executive Director John Leary says both farmers and relief agencies are making the same grave error.

“There is too much reliance on maize,” he says. “Smallholder farmers living on the edge of poverty are gambling with their livelihoods, health, and lives when they only plant one crop. What happens when the rains don’t come or a pest ravages the produce? You’re left with nothing.”

In particular, Zambia has historically produced maize as a staple crop, but in the last five years drought has decimated the country’s production. In 2019 the country’s harvest neared a decade low with the national harvest falling to 2 million metric tons, that’s compared to a 2017 high of 3.6 million. Decreased supply and inflated prices has left more than 2 million Zambians food insecure.

“Zambian farmers, and farmers in other developing countries, will continue seeing inconsistent yields as long as the planet continues to warm,” Leary says. “But farmers can protect themselves from those inconsistencies by protecting their land and diversifying what they grow.”

In semi-arid regions like Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, the low rainfall and unrelenting heat means that farmers should be strategic about what they grow. Periods of drought are to be expected. Families in this region of the world are well-accustomed to lean seasons when there is little to eat because of growing conditions.

Trees for the Future (TREES), an international development organization, uses agroforestry and regenerative agriculture training to help smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa escape hunger and poverty, while improving their ecosystems and the environment. Contrary to the monocropping intensification techniques (one crop) used by farmers around the world, TREES teaches farmers to plant productive polycultures. The Forest Garden Approach teaches families to protect, diversify, and optimize their land by planting fast-growing trees, fruit trees, and permagardens.

Leary says the first step smallholder farmers can take toward achieving food security is to plant a wall of trees around their farm. In zones across Africa where livestock roam free much of the year, living fences provide a free and renewable barrier to herding animals as well as harsh winds. Once land is protected he says the soil improves and farmers can plant a variety of crops. Just as a financial portfolio should be diversified, so too should a farm.

“The maize may fail due to drought one year, but hardier crops like sorghum and cassava would fare much better,” Leary says. “And though an early or late start of the rains could ruin an entire monocrop, tree crops like avocados, macadamia nuts and cashews will be a lot less affected.”

While there are barriers to acquiring seeds and learning new farming tactics, stakeholders in the region are recognizing the need for crop diversity in the region. A notable voice on the issue is Zambia’s Vice President Inonge Wina. Wina has been publicly encouraging Zambians to reduce their reliance on corn in their diets and look to more nutrient-rich and drought-tolerant options.

“The Vice-President has appealed to all Zambians to focus on diversifying diets at household-level,” said Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Vice-President Stephen Mwansa in a statement. “The switch is one of the low-cost and effective ways of also addressing stunting and malnutrition in the country, as well as assurance of food security at domestic and community-levels.”

“It’s promising to see a national leader advocate for crop and nutrient diversity,” says Leary. “The next step is convincing local farmers that there is a better option out there and helping farmers to think differently about their production systems.”

Leary’s organization began implementing and measuring the benefits of the Forest Garden Approach in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014. Since then, Trees for the Future has helped more than 73,000 people revitalize their lands and achieve food and income security. Using the FAO Household Food Insecurity Access Scale and the Household Dietary Diversity Score, TREES saw farmers’ food insecurity rates drop by 33 percent and dietary diversity scores improve by 44 percent.

“We’re working in some of the hottest, driest places in the world. But we see Senegalese and Tanzanian farmers using climate-smart permaculture and agroforestry to sustain themselves through drought,” Leary says.

Changing weather patterns and increased frequency and severity of droughts are unquestionably tied to global warming. This is exacerbated by unsustainable land use techniques, particularly the widespread use of fire to clear land for monocropping. Shortsighted slash-and-burn tactics are widely used in Southern Africa — in satellite imagery, fires in Australia and the Amazon pale in comparison to those burning on one-hectare farms in Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa. The lack of rain hasn’t kept Zambian farmers from burning their fields either. And sadly, these practices contribute to the cycle of drought and warming.

And while agribusinesses and farmers are leading contributors to land degradation and a changing climate, they are also the solution.

“The solution to climate change in the long term, is also the solution to hunger and famine right now,” says John Leary, Trees for the Future Executive Director. “When we transform the way we grow our food, we will reduce our impact on the environment, and we can also become more resilient, and less vulnerable to drought, natural disasters, and disease.”

Trees for the Future currently works in Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Their training materials are free and open to the public in Trees for the Future’s Forest Garden Training Center.

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Not since Florida’s hanging chad debacle of 2000 has there been an electoral clusterf*ck like last night’s Democratic caucus in Iowa. It’s been a full 12 hours since they finished playing musical chairs down at the VFW Hall, and the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) has released zero official results.

Maybe jamming all the voters in a phone booth and having them knock the crap out of each other is actually … a bad way to choose a presidential nominee?

Iowa is home to about 700,000 registered Democrats, who are invited to caucus at one of 1,678 precincts (or 99 satellite sites in places as far afield as Tbilisi, Georgia). Candidates must win the support of 15 percent of attendees to be considered viable, and the threshold is higher in smaller precincts.

After the first round, supporters of viable candidates are locked in and cannot switch teams. Oddly enough, if the “Uncommitted” group has 15 percent or higher, those people are also committed to their “no candidate.” Then supporters of viable candidates fall on the supporters of the also-rans and try to browbeat them into joining a team for the second alignment. And in its infinite wisdom, the DNC will report both of these numbers publicly.

But wait, there’s more! Each caucus precinct is awarded a predetermined number of state delegates based on Democratic turnout for the general elections in the 2016 presidential race and the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial election. That delegate allocation will not change no matter how many people show up to caucus. So if 18 people show up at one precinct, and 81 people show up at another, they can still wind up splitting the same number of delegates depending on historical turnout data from elections past.

Moreover, the division of delegates seems entirely arbitrary. How can Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren all wind up with two delegates in this scenario?

Who could predict that such a logical and streamlined process would break down? And yet, it did.

Smarting from accusations the it had rigged the nominating process for Clinton in 2016, the DNC bent over backwards to make this caucus as transparent as possible. They planned to publicize the first and second round data, along with the final delegate tallies, and they whipped up a cool new app for precincts to report their results. Silicon Valley saves the day again!

Or, maybe not. The app crashed, and the IDP’s phone line was deluged with phone calls from 1,700 precinct captains desperately trying to hand in their homework. There are also multiple complaints of miscounts because precinct captains didn’t understand that the new rule locking in supporters after the first viability threshold meant that they could leave and still have their votes counted.

As of this morning, the Party was manually retrieving caucus results and inputting them into their system. IDP Chair Troy Price promises to release half the results at 4 p.m. this afternoon, a result which should please exactly no one.

Particularly not Joe Biden, who appears to have suffered a massive loss, failing to reach the 15 percent cutoff in multiple precincts. The last thing he needs is two news cycles reporting his Iowa collapse before the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday, so he’s demanding a full investigation before any results are released.

And if the DNC was hoping to avoid charges that the primary was rigged, it seems to have managed to do exactly the opposite.

And when they finally put out the dumpster fire, this flawlessly equitable process will yield 11,402 county delegates, who will be winnowed down to 41 representatives to the Democratic National Convention in July where they’ll join 3,938 other state delegates to determine who will be the Democratic nominee in November.

That’s right, all this rigamarole, from a state which will almost certainly vote for Donald Trump, is for a whopping ONE PERCENT stake in the Democratic nomination. Just as the Founders intended.

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

It’s the most amazing and underrated perk to be able to do things like that instead of waiting until you retire.

— Al Saikali, a partner in Shook Hardy & Bacon’s Miami office, commenting on some of the wonderful things he was able to do during his three-month sabbatical from the firm, like taking his teenage daughter to the movies at noon. At Shook Hardy, lawyers are eligible for these sabbaticals every six years once they’ve spent seven years at the firm. Saikali also took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Middle East during his time away from the firm.

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

For the past 30 to 40 years, much of the country’s discussion regarding prohibition has focused on adult-use cannabis. The increasing abandonment of cannabis prohibition that we see today reflects a growing trend of social acceptance of its use. As Bonnie Kristian at “The Week” points out, “Americans understand why prohibition is ineffective and indefensibly inhumane” when it comes to substances like cannabis which possess wide cultural acceptance. However, as soon as you ask Americans to apply the same reasoning regarding prohibition to substances “associated with people unlike ourselves” suddenly the history of prohibition’s abject harm and failure no longer seems to factor into the discussion.

Take cannabis and gun prohibition for example. Similar to cannabis, the prohibition of guns has possessed two glaring flaws throughout history: 1) Prohibition has disproportionately and negatively impacted minority communities, and 2) Prohibition has been grossly ineffective in achieving its stated, self-defined goals. Yet, despite these remarkable similarities the view towards the necessity or efficacy of each policy of prohibition differs wildly depending on which political tribe one belongs to.

Another similarity between gun prohibition to cannabis is the amount of disinformation or outright lies that one sees in the discussion. No doubt many have seen presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s Super Bowl ad regarding gun violence. The problem is, the ad is riddled with dishonest figures and claims. To be clear, I am not a Second Amendment absolutist. But asking that we be honest about gun violence (spoiler alert: violent crime overall is decreasing despite guns being more prevalent than ever and the abandonment of gun control policies), when discussing gun control could get me labeled as a gun rights “nut.” Furthermore, it should not be controversial to ask that any framework of gun control take into account the history of its failures and the disproportionate impact it has placed on certain demographics.

The need to have an honest discussion regarding prohibition is important because if one applies any sort of scrutiny to prohibition, the justifications used to prop it up can quickly collapse under the weight of demonstrable evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than on the subject of immigration, where current arguments for prohibition are quite literally collapsing before our eyes. The same goes for prohibitionist policies related to abortion, so-called “hard drugs,” and alcohol. However, it may not be enough to simply prove prohibition doesn’t work in these cases or even that better alternatives exist.

As Eric Boehm at “Reason” points out, the true purpose behind the president’s prohibitionist policy tool of implementing a border wall, for example, “has little to do with drugs or immigrants.” How could it when it can be conclusively proven a substantial majority of immigrants here illegally do not cross the border where a wall would be but overstay their visas, and that most illegal drugs pass through existing checkpoints that already have walls and armed guards. The reason the prohibitionist policy of a massive border wall persists is, according to Boehm, because for the current president:

“[I]t’s a political symbol more than anything: a way to appeal to border hawks, a neat hook for the crowds at his rallies to chant. What does it matter if the wall can’t stand up to a gusty desert wind? The whole project has always been just a lot of hot air.”

Of course, not everyone who supports prohibition is just full of hot air. As I have said myself to anti-prohibitionist voices, one has to acknowledge the logical appeal of prohibition in certain circumstances in order to have any meaningful discussion regarding its merits. Drugs, guns, and alcohol all cause immense societal harms, particularly alcohol, and to say otherwise is also a lie. Accordingly, it is natural and, in fact, logical for human beings to reason that the appropriate response to these harms is to prohibit the substances that “cause” them. But after over a century of trying, we simply know enough now to understand that prohibition does not work in the way we logically might expect it to.

What becomes inexcusable is placing your head in the sand and intentionally ignoring the fact that alternatives to legal prohibition have been tried. That these alternative have proven, over lengthy periods of time, to be more successful in alleviating harms. Until and unless we detach prohibitionist policies from their association with tribal identity, however, the status quo of intentional ignorance likely isn’t going anywhere. Apparently, it is still too much to ask most Americans when assessing a policy of prohibition to simply look at whether the policy actually works and produces positive results. Which isn’t a comforting thought.

Did I also mention the San Francisco 49ers lost a Super Bowl where some terrible calls were made at crucial, crucial, moments? So, anyways, if you need me, just look in a pit of sports despair.

Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

At 82, Judge Raymond C. Clevenger III of the Federal Circuit has no more patience for your bullshit and has no reservations about letting you know. When a Department of Justice attorney tried to dance around his question about the government collecting “blatantly illegal” PACER fees, he got brutal.

It’s an embarrassing exchange for the DOJ, but lucky for them no one is going to pay PACER to see it.

Monday’s argument is the latest in the ongoing battle over PACER fees. In 2018, Judge Huvelle determined that the ludicrous fees the government charges to access public documents exceeded the legal mandate to charge only what’s necessary to cover the costs of operating the system. Since then, the courts have gone on the offensive, telling Congress that PACER can never be free and backed its words with the vaguest nod to maybe possibly having data that no one else can see possible. Judge Audrey Fleissig told legislators last year that the system cost over $100 million to operate which conveniently tracked the roughly $140 million in revenue the system generates. But there were far fewer answers as to why a website is costing 100 million anything to run.

Judge Clevenger asked the DOJ attorney if, as most suspect, the government is siphoning money from the PACER largesse to fund the federal judiciary generally. As he put it, “redecorating the office” or “gold-plated toilets” improvements that should only be made with funds directly allocated by Congress as opposed to the profits of public record paywalls. Someone’s got to pay so the next Judge Kozinski doesn’t have to keep his porn on a private server!

When the DOJ attorney tried to spin her way out of it, Judge Clevenger got biting, asking her if she struggles as much in life as she does in court. It’s a good dig, but how about a little sympathy for how hard it is to answer questions in day-to-day life? When you’re in court at least you’ve done the research and have your talking points rehearsed. Imagine the sorts of questions you have to face as a DOJ lawyer just interacting with the world on a daily basis. “How are you going to pay off these loans?” “When should you make the jump to the private sector?” “What is it like to defend throwing children in internment camps?”

It’s rough out there generally in life.

Cranky Federal Judge to DOJ Lawyer: Do You Have Trouble Answering Questions in General or Just Here? [Law & Crime]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.