IFAD says lack of ag investment contributes to high food prices

Food prices increased again in the month June. Many factors are blamed for the record high food prices such as climate change and biofuels. The United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development says today that a lack of investment in agriculture is also to blame.

From Bloomberg, writer Sungwoo Park relays the assessment from the IFAD.

“We are just depleting our stocks and now we have this high population growth,” Kanayo F Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said in an interview. “Prices won’t come down overnight. They are going to stay high for some time to come.”

Global food costs tracked by the United Nations increased in June for the 10th time in the past 12 months, staying near a record on higher rice, sugar and dairy prices, while meat reached an all-time high. Aid to agriculture dropped to 4.3 percent of total assistance in 2008 from 18 percent in 1979, according to IFAD data.

“Food price crisis, food price hikes or food price volatility is not just a simple consequence of shortage of food because of weather conditions and climate change,” Nwanze said in an interview on July 22 in Seoul. “A primary cause is we’ve disinvested in agriculture over decades.”

Nwanze has urged the global community for more investments in rural development to help meet growing food demand led by emerging economies including China, India and Brazil. The 165- member nation agency works to combat rural poverty and hunger by providing low-interest loans and grants to developing countries.

New head of IFAD wants food that provides more than sustenance

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development Kanayo Nwanze talks about food production as a security issue. Nwanze wants to guide the IFAD past simply raising production of food into food production that provides income.

Writer Howard LaFranchi interviewed Nwanze on his goals for the IFAD.

"People now have a clear sense of the linkages between food security and national security," says Dr. Nwanze. That understanding is helping bring questions of hunger and rural development to a broader audience, he says, "as well as to some very high places."

Hunger now can mean increased cross-border and international migration. And the riots that accompanied recent food shortages and price hikes in several parts of the world show how hunger can destabilize governments in regions of critical importance to the international battle against extremism.

That's why issues of rural hunger and food security are increasingly cropping up in venues ranging from the US Congress to the G-8 group of industrialized countries, Nwanze says. It is the emergence of food as an international security issue, Nwanze adds, that raises the odds that the international community will help developing countries come up with sustainable answers to food production challenges.

"Sustainability is determined inside a country, the answers to food production and development have to come from within," says the agronomist who studied in Kansas State University and who is recognized for developing a high-yield, drought-resistant rice for Africa. "But we also need the participation of the broader international community to answer these challenges that today have an impact on everyone."

In Washington recently in advance of this month's World Summit on Food Security in Rome, Nwanze noted that the security dimension of hunger and food production is translating into greater interest in places like the US capital. IFAD, which Nwanze describes as a cooperative among 160 countries that provides grants for rural development projects, benefited from a US-led initiative this year to increase the organization's funding by two-thirds to about $100 million.

At the same time, the US Congress is considering the Global Food Security Act, a five-year authorization that seeks to improve US response to food crises, provide new funding for university research in agriculture and for rural development projects.

U.N. aid for small farmers has increased

The agriculture arm of the United Nations says that funds for farming support has increased despite the global recession. The U. N. International Fund for Agricultural Development says they now have a 1.2 billion dollar budget to support small farmers.

From Reuters Alert Net, reporter Muchena Zigomo interviews the head of the IFAD, Kanayo Nwanze.

"On the contrary, the food crisis of 2007/08 brought back agriculture on the agenda, and there seems to be a feeling that agriculture is one of the ways out of this economic crisis," Nwanze told Reuters in an interview.

"We've just completed, in December, our replenishment for the 2010-2012 cycle and our members increased their pledges by 67 percent, so we're going to be able to move our portfolio to about $1 billion to $1.2 billion per year from about $700-$750 million per year," he said.

He said due to IFAD's ability to co-finance projects with the World Bank and other multilateral lenders, a total of about $7.5 billion would be available for small-scale farmers over the next three years.

Small subsistence farmers around the world have been hard hit by ballooning prices of seed and fertiliser, threatening billions of people with hunger. IFAD says small farms feed up to 2 billion people, about a third of the global population.

Nwanze said smallholder farms in Africa -- which account for 95 percent of the continent's agricultural output -- are among the worst affected by the price spikes.

"If we are able to increase support for small-scale farmers on this continent, then I think many countries (in Africa) will achieve (economic) growth and get on the road to ending poverty," he said.

"We have statistics from the World Bank to show that investment in agriculture is 2-4 times more effective in reducing poverty than any other sector."

Oil producers 'must do more to fight poverty'

from The Gulf News

By Emmanuelle Landais, Staff Reporter

Dubai: An international organisation has called on oil producing countries to do more to eradicate poverty in rural areas.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) said more than 800 million people are living on less than a dollar a day in rural areas of Asia and Africa yet only 100 million of them get international aid.

Mona Bishay, director of IFAD's Near East and North Africa division, said rural poverty is a phen-omenon with the number of people living on a dollar a day or less estimated at 59 million.

Bishay said funds and grants have been given to countries in the Middle East for technological development.

Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt and North African countries are some of the countries where IFAD projects target the poorest residents and the agriculture sector.

"We don't target irrigated areas, it is only dry areas with minimal rain, mountainous areas and isolated areas.

"Unemployment among young people has reached 35 per cent in North Africa. This is a very serious problem," said Bishay.

She said poor rural areas had been surveyed to gather information.

"Our dream is to create innovative models so bigger organisations can adopt them. We have to go through the government, we cannot just do it by ourselves," said Bishay.

Lennart Bage, president of IFAD, said countries in the Organisation of Petro-leum Exporting Countries (Opec) were giving support but some countries had increased their donations while others had not.

"The possibility exists for higher contributions. Higher oil prices helped some countries and allowed them to contribute more," said Bage.

"We want to enable the rural poor to support themselves. Some of the projects are temporary but we hope that once it is finished the community will be able keep going," he said.

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members except Bahrain are founding members of IFAD when it was established in 1977.

A cooperation agreement was signed by the GCC and IFAD in 1989 to jointly pursue shared development goals.

Bage is scheduled to attend the annual meeting of the heads of the Arab Funds Coordination Group, which will bring together the eight most important aid agencies of the Arab world in Kuwait on February 4.