Welcome to UNESCO

Hey delegates! My name is Annalise Fox and I am so excited to be one of your vice chairs for BMUN 66. I am currently a freshman at Berkeley majoring in Global Peace and Conflict with a concentration on the Middle East. Outside of school, I love reading, hiking, movies, and watching ice hockey. I did MUN all throughout high school even attending BMUN last year as a delegate. I absolutely love the different insights and perspectives which MUN can give you on such interesting issues! It has really opened my eyes to numerous troubles the world faces, many of which I was not aware of before attending conferences. I truly hope with these topics our committee can impact you in the same way it has impacted me!

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Soil Power!

To follow up on the article on the projected maize and wheat production in the world due to climate change, New York times has this article by Jacques Leslie that provides a possible solution to both potentials food shortage and global warming. The author describes how a method of carbon sequestration can help solve both. " Now scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields. Many scientists and farmers believe the emerging understanding of soil’s role in climate stability and agricultural productivity will prompt a paradigm shift in agriculture ,..." The article is pretty loaded with one of the solution that have become popular among environmental scientists. Read and ask any questions you might have.

Egyptian Bread Riots

One important aspect of sustainable agriculture that often remains overlooked is the negative effect which it can have on the stability of governments. Although these may seem unrelated, governments have been hit hard by food shortages due to climate related natural disasters, which without sustainable agriculture, can proceed to wipe out entire food supplies. The Middle East has been hit particularly hard by these food shortages due to the nature of their governments subsidy system. In the mid to late 1900s, many governments attempted to launch plans of food subsidies in an attempt to maintain power and favor of the people. Suddenly, citizens were receiving more aid than ever before and put much trust in the previously unstable relationship with the government. However, although good in principle, the citizens soon became reliant on these subsidies and expected them from their government. Many nations have attempted to receive aid for the debt that these subsidies have placed them in...

CRISPR and genome edited crops - what it means for agriculture

In the last few years, you may have heard the term “CRISPR” – pronounced ‘crisper’ – pop up a few times. But what exactly is CRISPR, and why is it so important? Well, in order to answer that, let’s first pay a quick visit to 2012. That was the year that Jennifer Doudna – a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley – and her team characterized the activity of what’s now known as CRISPR-cas9. The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology and CRISPR Associated System (cas) was first discovered in bacteria as a defense against foreign viruses and DNA. Eventually, its use progressed into eukaryotic cells for purposes of modification, as the technology was adapted by the Broad Institute for genetic engineering. So how is this accomplished? Basically, CRISPR-cas9 consists of two main parts: the cas9 enzyme, which is capable of cutting DNA at specific locations within the genome – think of pair of molecular scissors – and ...

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