Ai Weiwei 'cannot leave Beijing'

23 June 2011 Last updated at 10:25 GMT Mr Ai said he could not speak to the media about his case

China's foreign ministry has said that artist Ai Weiwei cannot leave Beijing without permission, a day after he was freed from police detention.

Mr Ai - a vocal government critic - was bailed after the Chinese authorities said he had confessed to tax evasion. Mr Ai said he was unable to comment.

The 54-year-old's arrest in April sparked an international outcry.

Mr Ai was held for 80 days at a secret detention centre with no access to a lawyer or contact with his family.

Western governments had demanded Mr Ai's release and that of many other activists who have been rounded up by China's authorities in recent months, in what is the most serious crackdown on dissidents in China in many years.

Silenced?

Speaking on Thursday, foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei outlined the terms of Mr Ai's bail, which are valid for 12 months.

"During this period, Ai Weiwei is still under investigation. Without permission... he is not allowed to leave his area of residence," Mr Hong told reporters.

He said "area of residence" meant "the city" (Beijing) and stressed that Mr Ai was not confined to his house.

He confirmed state media reports that Mr Ai had been released due to his "good attitude in confessing his crimes" and because of health issues. The artist has diabetes.

Mr Ai appeared briefly outside the gate of his studio in Beijing on Thursday.

He told reporters he was happy to be home and had not slept since being released by police overnight, adding he could not say any more to the media.

So China's most famous living artist and one of the most outspoken critics of the ruling Communist Party appears to have been silenced, says the BBC's Damian Grammaticas in Beijing.

China's police allege Mr Ai has admitted to tax evasion and promised to pay back the money.

His supporters say the charges were motivated by his activism.

News of his release has received a guarded welcome. A US state department spokesman said everyone held in China for "exercising their human rights" should be freed.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Mr Ai's release could only be a first step, and China must fully explain the accusations against him.

Amnesty International said his long detention without charge had violated China's own legal process.

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Warming 'to leave tropics hungry'

3 June 2011 Last updated at 02:33 GMT By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News Areas where food supplies could be worst hit by climate change have been identified in a report.

Some areas in the tropics face famine because of failing food production, an international research group says.

The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) predicts large parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will be worst affected.

Its report points out that hundreds of millions of people in these regions are already experiencing a food crisis.

"We are starting to see much more clearly where the effects of climate change on agriculture could intensify hunger and poverty," said Patti Kristjanson, an agricultural economist with the CCAFS initiative that produced the report.

A leading climatologist told BBC News that agriculturalists had been slow to use global climate models to pinpoint regions most affected by rising temperatures.

This report is the first foray into the field by the CCAFS initiative. To assess how climate change will affect the world's ability to feed itself, CCAFS set about finding hotspots of climate change and food insecurity.

Focusing their search on the tropics, the researchers identified regions where populations are chronically malnourished and highly dependent on local food supplies.

Then, basing their analysis on the climate data amassed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the team predicted which of these food-insecure regions are likely to experience the greatest shifts in temperature and precipitation over the next 40 years.

Mapping hunger

By overlaying the maps, the team was able to pinpoint which hungry regions of the tropics would suffer most.

Continue reading the main story

In many places in Africa you are really going to need [a] revolution in farming systems”

End Quote Bruce Campbell CCAFS director With many areas in Africa predicted to become drier, countries such as South Africa which predominately farm maize have the option to shift to more drought resistant crops.

But for countries such as Niger, in western Africa, which already supports itself on very drought resistant crop varieties, like sorghum and millet, there is little room for manoeuvre, explains Bruce Campbell, the director of CCAFS.

"West Africa really stands out as problematic. Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali. They are already dependent on sorghum and millet.

"In many places in Africa you are really going to need [a] revolution in farming systems," he says.

"We need everything we can lay our hands on," said Sir Gordon Conway, professor of international development at Imperial College London.

Governments are aiming to limit the average increase in temperature to 2C by the end of the century, he explained. But if temperatures continue to follow their current trajectories "we are on for a 3-4C increase", Sir Gordon explained.

If this was correct "things get very alarming", the professor said.

Professor Martin Parry, a visiting professor at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, who co-chaired one of the working groups in the IPCC's last climate assessment, responded to the report by saying he thought that CGIAR, the parent body to the CCAFS, had been slow to move into the field of climate change as a key area of research. But he added that this step was very welcome.

But he cautioned: "This gives us a better local picture of where the most vulnerable areas might be… but it doesn't make strong enough connections between the changes in the weather and its impacts on yields."

This made it difficult to plan for adaptations, Professor Parry told BBC News.

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