North Korean harvests improving

North Korea made headlines a couple of years ago when it asked for food aid. The isolated country finally had to break out to prevent its population from starving.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently returned from a trip from North Korea to give an assessment on the country’s food security. The F.A.O. finds that harvests have improved over the last couple of years but not enough to prevent malnutrition for many.

From Reuters Alert Net, we read the latest on food security in North Korea.  

The U.N. organisation forecast a 10 percent increase in the main 2012 harvests and 2013 early season crops compared with a year earlier, and said production was expected to hit 5.8 million metric tons.

The country faced a staple food deficit of 207,000 metric tons, the lowest in many years, but 2.8 million people remained vulnerable to undernutrition, the FAO added.

...

"DPR Korea still needs international help," Kisan Gunjal, FAO economist and the mission's co-leader, said in a statement. "The new harvest figures are good news, but the lack of proteins and fats in the diet is alarming."

Niger will pitch new food security plan to international investors

The country of Niger is about to present a new plan for agriculture to international investors. Titled 3N or Nigeriens Nourish Nigeriens, the plan includes 11 different programs to help the country feed itself. The programs range from improved irrigation, storage and transfer of milk, and diversifying seeds.

From the Guardian, reporter Liz Ford talked to 3N commissioner Hassane Mamoudou about the project.

Speaking to journalists in Brussels this week, Mamoudou said local civil society and grassroots organisations in the country's 266 municipalities can propose ideas for how the money is spent in their areas. "All actions will start at the grassroots," he said.

"We have to target where projects are implemented. Sorghum and millet will only grow in regions where there's enough rain. If a region does not have enough rain, we don't produce it [there]. Some areas will be for livestock breeding only. If fisheries are an activity in one region, we will focus on fisheries there. We won't do everything everywhere."

A proportion of the resources will be reserved for people from marginalised groups, who are sometimes excluded from programmes. All project proposals must come with an environment and social impact study, to prove sustainability and ensure they do not have a negative impact on the environment.

The 3N initiative has been in development since 2011, when the country's president, Mahamadou Issoufou, established an action plan and called on donors to help respond to the looming food crisis following a poor harvest. This swift action helped prevent a crisis becoming a famine.

Two-thirds of Niger is desert, and only around 11% of the land is suitable for farming. "The main problem is water. Water to drink, of course, water for agriculture, for animals. And now, we have food crises recurring [video]," said Mamoudou. "We used to have a food crisis every 10 years; now every seven, every five, every two years we have a crisis. They come closer and closer and are bigger and bigger."

FAO chief calls for a sheriff to curb "land grabs"

More attention is being paid to "land grabs" by the highest levels of the United Nations. The head of the Food and Agriculture Organization says it is time to put some laws in place to curb the practice.

Large global investors are grabbing up large swaths of farm-able land in Africa and Asia. Often the governments that allow this to happen are corrupt and just do it for the money. The practice decreases the amount of land used in growing food for local consumption even further. Many experts feel that land grabs are one of the leading factors causing food insecurity of poor nations.

From the Guardian. writer Mark Tran recorded the FAO director general's comments.  

José Graziano da Silva, the FAO's director general, conceded it was not possible to stop large investors buying land, but said deals in poor countries needed to be brought under control.

"I don't see that it's possible to stop it. They are private investors," said Graziano da Silva in a telephone interview. "We do not have the tools and instruments to stop big companies buying land. Land acquisitions are a reality. We can't wish them away, but we have to find a proper way of limiting them. It appears to be like the wild west and we need a sheriff and law in place."

Large land deals have accelerated since the surge in food prices in 2007-08, prompting companies and sovereign wealth funds to take steps to guarantee food supplies. But, four to five years on, in Africa only 10-15% of land is actually being developed, claimed Graziano da Silva. Some of these investments have involved the loss of jobs, as labour intensive farming is replaced by mechanised farming or some degree of loss of tenure rights.

Oxfam said the global land rush is out of control and urged the World Bank to freeze its investments in large-scale land acquisitions to send a strong signal to global investors to stop.

Graziano da Silva, who was in charge of Brazil's widely praised "zero hunger" programme, expressed his frustration at the slow pace of creating a global governance structure to deal with land grabs, food security and similar problems. In 2008, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, created a high-level task force on food security on which Graziano Da Silva serves as vice-chairman.

...

As for the perennial debate on the respective merits of large- and small-scale farming, the FAO boss said Africa had room for both, adding that Brazil had managed it.

"In some areas of Africa – Mozambique and South Africa – there is scope for large farms, but this approach is only valid for some grains, where the entire cycle is mechanical," he said. "But this is not suitable for fruits, vegetables or many other local products. Cassava has nothing to do with mechanised agriculture and efficiency does not mean big scale. It's the way you combine crops, the use of water you have available. In Africa today, efficiency means better seeds rather than big tractors. The two models have been there forever in agriculture. Sometimes big-scale will provide exports, but local markets are based on small-scale agriculture."

North Koreans escape from hunger

From IRIN, a story about North Koreans fleeing the food shortages within their country.

Thailand is fast becoming a transit country for North Koreans fleeing severe food shortages and poverty, authorities say.

Thousands now make their way along the more than 5,000km, often-dangerous route, through China and Laos to the kingdom en route to South Korea.

Since 2004, when just 46 North Korean asylum seekers were reported by Thailand's Immigration Bureau, the numbers have jumped to nearly 2,500 in 2010.

Thailand is the easiest route to access and the most accommodating, compared with Mongolia or Vietnam, where border security is tighter and in some cases, those fleeing have been sent back to face harsh punishment.

The trend is likely to continue, judging by a recent report by the World Food Programme (WFP), citing a bitter winter, crop loss, and lack of resources to secure cereal supplies from outside the country.

"We are at a crossroads right now: if we manage to get food into the country we can reach thousands of hungry children and their mothers on time," Claudia von Roehl, WFP country director, told IRIN from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. "Our primary concern is for those who are most vulnerable to food shortages - children, mothers and the elderly."

Government rations - mainly cereals, maize and rice - provide only about a third of people's daily food needs; some families are already resorting to negative survival strategies, including cutting down on the size and number of meals, the UN food agency reports.

In recent months, the government has distributed between 150-200 grams per person per day, while the full ration is close to 600g.

Eating grass

One young women just arriving in Thailand said her family in North Korea had cut down to one meal a day.

"We never had any days that we felt full in our stomach. Many times we cut the grass in the forest to eat."

The soft-spoken 26-year-old former teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, began her exodus six years ago, by crossing the 526km Tumen River into China and then spending five years working to pay off the smuggler fees that made her escape possible.

Local Chiang Rai Police Chief Potsawee Chotienchaikun has talked to many of the asylum-seekers who regularly surrender themselves to authorities after reaching the Mekong River.

Thailand's reputation as a safe port of entry for North Koreans has spread by word of mouth, he believes.

"I think the people who have escaped in the past have made contact with their friends in North Korea and told them where it is safe to go. The South Koreans welcome the people because they are the same nationality, they speak the same language and the South Koreans have enough resources to take care of them."

Those resources reportedly include an initial re-settlement subsidy of six million won (US$5,330) per person and housing assistance.

But despite the fact that part of the subsidy goes straight into the hands of the traffickers who orchestrated the escape, the overall benefits seem to outweigh the losses.

"Here in Thailand it's quite clear that every North Korean who has arrived is being considered by the South Korean embassy and is being sent to South Korea," says the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, Phil Robertson.

"There's a system here that works in terms of North Koreans who can reach their destination."

But the root of the problem remains the scarce food resources in North Korea, an isolated nation of more than 24 million; Robertson hopes the country will continue to allow in teams to assess the situation.

"We would continue to press for the advancement and openness that we've seen to be made permanent because people should not be allowed to starve."

Meanwhile, for the lucky few, the sight of the smiling Buddha on the Thai side of the Mekong River is a sign of hope.

"When I crossed into Thailand, I was very happy. My life is safe now and I realize that I have survived," said the former teacher.

According to media reports cited by North Korean Economy Watch, a weblog on North Korean economic issues, more than 20,000 North Korean defectors have arrived in South Korea since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a truce. The number does not account for the estimated tens of thousands hiding in China.

Uneven growth in India leaves one state in a food crisis

India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, yet that growth has been very uneven. One state within India is still going through a food crisis because of repeated droughts.

From the Guardian, writer Nilanjana Bhowmick talks about the state of hunger in Madhya Pradesh.

Bundelkhand lies mainly in Madhya Pradesh, the second largest state in India and the one that contains the greatest concentration of hungry people in the country. The Indian State Hunger Index released in 2008 placed Madhya Pradesh in the "extremely alarming" hunger category. The state is a glaring example of everything that is wrong with India's poverty elimination efforts.

Of the 118 countries on the global hunger index, India ranks 98th, with 214 million people going hungry. Millennium development goal 1, which looks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and provide food security by 2015, is miles off.

In 1993-94, 44.6% of people were living at below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh. If MDG targets are to be met, that figure must go down to 22.3% by 2015. Yet, according to new poverty estimates produced by a government fact-finding commission, poverty in the state has increased by 4% to 48.6%. A survey by a local NGO revealed 83% of children are undernourished and most families go to bed on an empty stomach.
...

A key factor in India's plight has been the government's espousal of development at the cost of agriculture - the mainstay of people in the rural areas. Nationally, agriculture provides 67% of employment. In the last financial year, the Indian government provided around 500,000 crores (US$112bn) of subsidies and exemptions to the industrial and corporate sector, which contributes just 22% to the employment sector, while government expenditure on agriculture declined by 4.3%.

India's hunger problem has also been compounded by the high price of food over the last couple of years. A report on consumption patterns in rural India by the National Sample Survey Organisation shows a decline of 1.97%. In 2005-06, an average of 11.9kg of food grain was consumed per month, per family member, at a cost of 106 rupees ($2.38). In 2006-07, that figure came down to 11.69kg, with the cost of food increasing to 115 rupees ($2.58).
...

One such scheme is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), which came into being in 2005. The scheme ensures rural people livelihood security by guaranteeing them 100 days of work every year. Under the terms of NREGA, every rural Indian has the right to work within 15 days of requesting it and without having to travel more than three miles outside their village.

Dreze, one of the chief architects of the programme, says that it provides employment to 50 million poor people every year, but he admits that the implementation has been faulty.

"NREGA is a pro-worker law implemented by an anti-worker system," he says. "One manifestation of this is the systematic resistance of the administration to any sort of accountability. All the accountability provisions - unemployment allowance, compensation for delayed payments, penalty clauses - have been sidelined. This defeats the purpose of the act."

New rust resistant wheat hopes to improve food security

Scientists say they have developed a new wheat strain that is resistant to the disease UG99. The new strain of wheat could prove important in proving food security around the world. Wheat is very susceptible to the effects of climate change while rice and maize yields might be able to improve. A failed wheat harvest in Russia is one of the contributing factors to the record high food prices we are seeing now.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Soumya Karlamangla describes the disease and the hopes that scientists have for the new wheat strain.

Ug99, a virulent strain of wheat stem rust discovered over a decade ago, could potentially damage up to 90 percent of the world’s wheat crop, particularly as changing climatic patterns carry it to new regions, the scientists warned. That is a serious problem as world demand for food is surging, particularly as incomes and appetites grow in emerging giants like China and India.

But new varieties should help defuse the threat, say the scientists, who have been working to stay one step ahead of the pest.

“Stem rust is devastating - it’s the source of the great biblical plagues,” said Ronnie Coffman, principal investigator of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat Project, an effort aiming to combat wheat crop diseases, and director of International Programs of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.

POTENTIAL LOSSES

Since it was discovered in East Africa in 1998, Ug99 has been detected in nearly a dozen nations in Africa and the Middle East. It is a dangerous epidemic; in the early 1950s, a major outbreak of stem rust destroyed 40 percent of North America’s spring wheat crop.

Now, scientists aim to create and distribute resistant strains before the disease makes its way to the world’s breadbaskets located throughout Africa, North and South America, the Indian subcontinent and Australia.

With progress on new varieties well advanced, Coffman said, the main challenge will be getting farmers in areas yet to be affected by stem rust to plant the resistant varieties.

The new varieties offer some side benefits: an increase in crop yields of 15 percent and resistance to yellow rust, a less damaging pest that is currently hurting crop yields in Africa and the Middle East.

Coffman hopes these added factors will help win over governments and farmers. If not, a reduction in the production of wheat - the world’s most widely grown crop and the number one staple for a third of the world’s population - could wreak havoc on the already tight global food supply.

Video: The maize puzzle

From NTV Kenya, a video on a shortage of maize in Kenya and how government may have ignored signs that led to it.

Bolivia considers new law to improve food security

Bolivian government is considering putting more money into making the country more food secure. 25 years ago most of what Bolivia ate was grown within its borders, now they import most of their food. Some features of the law include preserving Bolivia's agricultural diversity and developing its own seeds.

From the Guardian, writer Mattia Cabitza describes the new initiative to make Bolivia food secure.

The president is soon expected to sign the Law of Productive, Communal and Agricultural Revolution. The government says it will invest $500m (£308m) in sustainable policies that guarantee the local and self-sufficient production of high quality food, while preserving and respecting the country's immense biodiversity.

A key part of the proposals in this "food revolution" is Bolivia's intention to produce its own seeds.

"[They] are a major factor in food production," said Carlos Romero, the minister who proposed the draft law. "But in recent years we've seen an increase in their price across the world, because of a rise in oil prices and the monopoly exercised on seeds by a few corporations. That's why we want to create state-owned companies that produce seeds."

Bolivia hasn't been immune to the global volatility of food prices. Earlier this year, for example, it had to import sugar, after shortages led prices to double and sparked protests among consumers. Prices of locally-produced indigenous food, such as quinoa, are also at a record highs: some highland communities have taken to eating rice and pasta instead of their traditional – and more nutritious – crops.

Climate change, price speculation and foreign demand have taken much of the blame, but for Demetrio Pérez, president of Anapo, an association of more than 14,000 wheat, soya and corn producers in the country's fertile eastern plains, consumers are also too reliant on imports.

"We depend too much on Argentina and Brazil," Pérez said. "So what better way to produce our own seeds? If we use the latest technology and have a good harvest, prices can go down and we can convert Bolivia into an exporting country."

Is it time to build up food stockpiles again?

The record high food prices have stimulated a new debate on the use of government food reserves. The reserves were stockpiled by governments to help prevent shortages or big price jumps. The US stockpile is now at a record low due to concern about too much government intervention into the food market. Some say it is time for the stockpiles to be built up again because of the many weather related disruptions the world has suffered lately.

From the Nourishing the Planet blog, Epoch Times writer Kremena Krumova summarizes the disscusion of food reserves.

At the G-20 meeting last month in Rome, leaders discussed developing an emergency reserve system, aimed at servicing the most vulnerable countries.

Still, world powers could not reach a consensus on what French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire called, the “very last solution,” in a meeting with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in Washington earlier this month.

Some of the sticking points mentioned by Le Maire are Brazil and Argentina’s desire to reduce price volatility, but at the same time willingness to allow commodity prices to keep rising. And China has found it difficult to accept the idea of increasing transparency in the markets, which is what a global reserve system would require.

Further discussions will be held at the next G-20 meeting in Paris, June 22-23. France currently holds the G-20 presidency and has been spearheading the effort.

Another option would be to agree to “virtual reserves,” which is based on shared and coordinated commitment for supplying food between participating countries. In this system, commodities would be bought in the futures market as hedges. In other words, they would be promissory, not actual budget expenditures.

The concept has its critics, however, who see it as an inferior option.

“Virtual reserves concept is flawed from the beginning. Countries need out-of-market, physical reserves,” argues Harwood D. Schaffer, research assistant professor at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.

Schaffer says that the issue of food reserves is purely a question of politics.

“We can easily solve the problem with food production. What makes this hard to solve, are actually politics and ideology,” he said.

Severe drought, high food prices hit pastoralists in Kenya

From IRIN, a story about a growing drought that threatens food security in northern Kenya.

Successive poor rains coupled with rising food and fuel prices are leading to a worsening food security situation with alarming levels of acute malnutrition being recorded in drought affected parts of Kenya, mainly in the north of the country, say experts.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2011 is the driest period in the eastern Horn of Africa since 1995 “with no likelihood of improvement until early 2012”.

"From the nutrition point of view, it is possibly the worst we have seen in the last 20 years," Noreen Prendiville, chief of nutrition at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Kenya office, told IRIN, noting that increased global acute malnutrition rates of over 35 percent are being seen in some drought-affected areas.

"In less serious situations, one would hear so many requests for assistance with livestock or water, but just now, the number one request is food and the need is substantial and urgent."

While past droughts have been longer, such as the 2008-09 one, “the current drought is severe, and its impacts have been exacerbated by extremely high food prices, reduced coping capacity, and a limited humanitarian response,” said the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

“The high food and fuel prices have affected the capacity of the very poor to buy food and to access basic services... The international response has been affected by the global economic crisis," Prendiville said. "The problem of insecurity too has caused a lot of displacement." she added.

The predominantly northern pastoral region is often the scene of resource-based clashes leading to the displacement of some communities. In May alone in Turkana, 16 armed livestock raids took place with thousands of heads of livestock stolen, according to data compiled by the UN.

Failed harvests

According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), two consecutive below-average rainfall seasons have resulted in failed harvests, depletion of grazing resources and significant livestock mortality in the Horn of Africa region. In Kenya, FAO added in a statement, the food security situation is expected to further deteriorate as milk production in the drought-affected areas has collapsed and will not recover until October when the short rains are expected to start.

In the northeastern Garissa region, the food scarcity has led to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid. “Most farmers have lost their livestock. The situation is moving from bad to worse,” Garissa District Commissioner Samson Macharia told IRIN.

Macharia said the number of food aid recipients in Garissa County, excluding those in the Ijara area, had risen to 116,850 - up from 101,600 in March. This total represents about 40 percent of the county’s population.

A planned food security assessment is expected to further increase this number, he said.

Food prices have shot up in Garissa, like elsewhere, with a kilogramme of meat selling at about 400 shillings (US$4.7) compared to 250-300 ($3-$3.5) in 2010. The price of a litre of milk has also almost tripled to 80 shillings (95 US cents) over a similar period, Garissa trader Hassan Ali Ibrahim, told IRIN.

"There is no milk, no meat. The livestock have died or migrated to Somalia," said Ibrahim. "The children are emaciated and having diarrhoea. If you are human, you would be affected by the situation here."

According to FAO, wholesale maize prices in Kenya in May in the main urban markets of Nairobi and Mombasa were 60-85 percent above the levels of May 2010.

Gloomy outlook

The food security of an estimated 2.4 million people is likely to decline after June in most northern pastoral and the southeastern and coastal marginal agricultural areas, said FEWSNET, which further warned that food security could decline to emergency levels among pastoralists.

At present, UNICEF and partners are scaling up nutrition and health outreach and clinic services in the affected areas to deal with the high number of malnourished children needing therapeutic and supplementary feeding. A low human resource capacity, long distances to affected regions and few health resources are, however, challenges.

The government also announced, on 14 June, a doubling of the monthly allocation of famine relief food (maize, beans and rice) to affected areas. Other interventions include livestock offtake programmes and maize importation to boost declining food reserves.

With drought being a cyclic event in the Horn of Africa region, experts are calling for longer-term approaches in mitigation.

"Food insecurity in the northern Kenya region is a running emergency. There is a need for more thinking on what can be done in the long term," Misheck Laibuta, Oxfam GB Kenya livelihoods and food security adviser, told IRIN. “There is a need for well-thought out solutions. There will need to be investment in initiatives such as alternative livelihoods and water management.”

According to FAO’s regional emergency coordinator for Eastern and Central Africa, Rod Charters, “the challenge ahead is to empower farmers and pastoralists to adapt to the new realities of high variability of weather patterns and more frequent extreme weather events.”

Frop

Rajiv Shah on food security

USAid chief Rajiv Shah stopped by the UK recently to give a talk to the London School of Economics. The scholars gathered there were largely appreciative of the work he has done as the leader of the US government's largest development aid organization. Even though much of the talk focused on aid going to Afghanistan and Iraq, Shah was much more animated in talking about food security.

Guardian reporter Madeleine Bunting was in the audience for the talk and recorded some of Shah's comments.

But the subject that is probably closest to Shah's personal interests is food security. For seven years, he was director of programmes at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agriculture. And well before that, he remembers as a small boy visiting India for the first time with his parents from his home in suburban Detroit and experiencing with shock the slums of Mumbai and the acute human suffering he saw there. That childhood experience is what has driven his career.

"The 2008-09 food crisis pushed 100 million people back into poverty. We have been here before. In the late 60s, Paul Ehrlich was warning of a population bomb in which millions would starve, but that led to US agronomist, Norman Borlaug and his work on the green revolution – which has saved hundreds of millions of lives. We have learned a lot now about the environmental degradation it caused.

"But Africa was bypassed, and in 2006 the US was spending only $240m of its aid budget on agriculture, less than 3%. We have now increased that to $1.2bn in a programme, Feed the Future, which is working in 20 countries. The aim is to lift more than 18 million out of poverty and ensure that 7.1 million children are no longer malnourished."

Shah sees a big role for the private sector in this programme but also emphasises that the biggest impact on poverty will come from reaching small-scale women producers. USAid is working with co-operatives in countries such as Uganda.

"This is a structural challenge in global development: there are agrarian economies where large numbers of families devote 70% of their income to food, and that makes them highly susceptible to price shocks. A huge risk."

He believes that the right combination of technology and political will can have a huge impact in tackling this challenge, and points to the past as a reminder of what aid can achieve. "The Marshall plan for Europe after the second world war, the green revolution and oral rehydration are three examples of initiatives which have saved millions of lives. The last was the invention of USAid when diarrhoea was ravaging families in many developing countries and much of the effort was focused on extending healthcare services. But a simple rehydration solution given to mothers has empowered them to save their children's lives. It's one of the greatest success stories of aid. Not only does it save lives, it reduces the disease burden of stunted development."

On such subjects, Shah is a powerful advocate for aid, but question him on controversial aspects of US development policy, such as subsidies to US cotton farmers that hit west Africa so badly, and he becomes vague – an indication of how USAid can find its work undermined by other government department policies such as on trade or agriculture.

A roundup on the launch of "Grow"

OXFAM launches a new targeted campaign today that focuses on growing more food and removing the barriers that contribute to starvation. The campaign called "Grow" is being compared to previous high profile  efforts such as "Make Poverty History"  

OXFAM says that the system that controls the food growing process is broken and unfair. They say that examples of the broken system show up in the problems of climate change, land grabs, food price hikes and intensive farming. "Grow" hopes to get people involved to speak up against the vested interests that are behind these problems. 

OXFAM hopes that "Grow" will spur change in three areas; sustainable production, equality and resilience of the food system. A sustainable food system has to be created to meet the growing demand for food and with less farm land and water to meet that demand. They also hope to make the system more equitable as the rich world throws away too much food. Finally, OXFAM hopes to improve the resilience of farming as a single flood can lead an entire nation to starvation.

Here is some commentary from a few bloggers about the launch of Grow. First, the pro side from OXFAM consultant Alex Evans who blogs at Global Dashboard.

For one thing, the campaign marks a major break with traditional single issue campaigning. This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.

For the con side, Ranil Dissanayake from Aid Thoughts has the following critique.

This wouldn’t be Aid Thoughts if I didn’t have some gripes, though. There are two big areas where I’m doubtful. The first relates to one of the good things about the report: it recognizes that there are really powerful vested interests aligned against the changes the report calls for. The problem is that I don’t see a clear strategy for dealing with these interests beyond ‘naming and shaming’ and advocacy for better practices. I suspect this will only make private vested interests (normally corporations) change just enough to buy breathing space. Real success in the sphere depends on changing the incentives at work for these vested interests, by changing their risk/reward/cost ratios. This is the hardest thing to do, but ultimately it’s the one with the biggest potential. How do we go about it? I’m not sure, but I’d like to see an attempt at a strategy.

The other major concern I have with the report is the high regard it has for smallholder farming.

It is true that some countries have made amazing advances in smallholder agriculture, and a couple have even developed or gone very far down that road on the back of smallholdings. These are outliers, and Vietnam is one of them, though in part attributable to the fact that there are over 2000 rivers in the country over 10km long – that’s a lot of available water. Grow goes so far as to smash some myths about smallholder farming, that they are unproductive and averse to risk, markets and technology. They are correct to do so. However, one thing they don’t address is that smallholder farms have a far, far tougher job colluding to take advantage of the massive economies of scale available to large farms. Irrigation, mechanization, crop rotation, research and development, fertilizer purchase, agri-processing: all are far easier for a larger agricultural unit.

Finally, a detailed account of the launch and why OXFAM thinks the campagn is important from their press release.

A broken food system and environmental crises are now reversing decades of progress against hunger according to new Oxfam analysis. Spiralling food prices and endless cycles of regional food crises will create millions more hungry people unless we transform the way we grow and share food. Tomorrow, Oxfam launches a new global campaign to ensure everyone has enough to eat always.

Oxfam’s GROW campaign is backed by high profile supporters including former President Lula of Brazil, Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and actress Scarlett Johansson.

A new report, ‘Growing a Better Future’, catalogues the symptoms of today’s broken food system: growing hunger, flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water and rising food prices. It warns we have entered a new age of crisis where depletion of the earth’s natural resources and increasingly severe climate change impacts will create millions more hungry people.

New research predicts that the price of staple foods such as maize, already at an all time high, will more than double in the next 20 years. Up to half of this increase will be due to climate change. The world’s poorest people who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food will be hardest hit.

Eight million people face chronic food shortages in East Africa today. Increasing numbers of regional and local crises could see demand for food aid double in the next 10 years.

By 2050 demand for food will rise 70 per cent yet our capacity to increase food production is declining. The average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990 and is set to decline to a fraction of one percent in the next decade.

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam said, “Our world is capable of feeding all of humanity yet one in seven of us are hungry today. In this new age of crisis, as climate change impacts become increasingly severe and fertile land and fresh water supplies become increasingly scarce, feeding the world will get harder still. Millions more men, women and children will go hungry unless we transform our broken food system.”

Oxfam’s GROW campaign will expose the governments whose failed policies are propping up the broken food system and the clique of 300 – 500 powerful companies who benefit from and lobby hard to maintain it. For example:

India: Despite doubling the size of it economy between 1990 and 2005 the number of hungry people in India increased by 65 million - more than the population of France - because economic development excluded the rural poor and social protection schemes failed to reach them. Today one in four of the world’s hungry people live in India.

United States: US policy ensures 15 percent of the world’s maize is diverted to engines, even at times of severe food crisis. The grain required to fill the petrol tank of an SUV with biofuels is sufficient to feed one person for a year.

Traders: Four global companies control the movement of most of the world’s food. Three companies - Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill – control an estimated 90 per cent of the world’s grain trade. Their activities help drive volatile food prices and they profit from them. In the first quarter of 2008, at the height of a global food price crisis, Cargill’s profits were up 86 percent and the company is now heading for its most profitable year yet on the back of further disruptions to global food supplies.

Oxfam has been responding to food crises for 70 years. Now it is calling on governments - especially the powerful G20 - to lead the transformation to a fairer more sustainable food system by investing in agriculture, valuing the world’s natural resources, managing the food system better and delivering equality for women who produce much of the world's food. It is calling on the private sector to shift to a business model where profit does not come at the expense of poor producers, consumers and the environment.

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam said: “For too long governments have put the interests of big business and powerful elites above the interests of the seven billion of us who produce and consume food. G20 Governments meeting in France this year must now kick start the transformation of our global food system.

"The G20 must invest in the 500 million small scale farms in developing countries which offer the greatest potential for increasing global yields – and they must help them adapt to a changing climate. They must regulate commodity markets and reform flawed biofuels policies to keep food prices in check.

“Governments must also ensure that women, who produce much of the world’s food, have the same rights to land, resources and opportunities as men – with equal rights women producers could feed themselves, their families, and up to 150 million additional people,” said Hobbs.

Former President Lula of Brazil said: "We can't wait anymore. Political leaders and global companies must act now to ensure that all people can put food on their table. There are no excuses. We have the capacity to feed everyone on the planet now and in the future. If the political will is there no one will be denied their fundamental human right to be free from hunger."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: "Many governments and companies will be resistant to change through habit, ideology or the pursuit of profit. It is up to us – you and me – to persuade them by choosing food that’s produced fairly and sustainably, by cutting our carbon footprints and by joining with Oxfam and others to demand change.”

Oxfam global ambassador Scarlett Johansson said, “Sharing food is one of life’s pleasures. On a global scale, we don’t share fairly. Close to a billion people go to bed hungry every night. The fact is: the global food system is a broken one. All of us, from Kentucky to Kenya, deserve enough to eat. That’s why I’m joining Oxfam’s GROW Campaign.”

Video: A beacon of hope in South Horr

From NTV Kenya, a visit to a Catholic mission that faces the challenge of growing food without much irrigation.

Food insecurity grips Horn of Africa

From IRIN, a look at how ever rising food prices are hurting the Horn of Africa.

The number of people requiring humanitarian assistance in the Horn of Africa could increase sharply in coming months due to below-average rainfall and high food and fuel prices, say aid workers.

Moreover, funding shortfalls, drought and conflict could further increase the number of people needing humanitarian aid in the region from an estimated 8.75 million people.

Peter Smerdon, spokesman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Kenya, told IRIN on 18 May: "The total number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in the Horn is 8.75 million; some of them get food aid from governments and other aid organizations. At least six million people need food assistance from WFP but this number could increase if the current rains are poor or below average."

According to Smerdon, by early May, about halfway through the rainy season, rainfall was well below average in most of the Horn, ranging from 5 to 50 percent of normal rates, and well below forecasts.

Funding shortfalls

Of particular concern, he said, were areas of southern and southeastern Ethiopia.

"Amid growing concern about the impact of drought in the southern and southeastern pastoralist areas, many of WFP's food assistance activities in Ethiopia face significant funding shortfalls," Smerdon said.

The agency said it was assisting 4.3 million people in Ethiopia.

In Somalia, WFP faces a 70 percent shortfall from May through October and urgently needs contributions of US$53 million to feed one million people in accessible areas for the next six months.

In Kenya, Smerdon said, WFP has a 50 percent funding shortfall of $47 million needed to provide food aid for the next six months to 1.7 million people.

In an April food security report Kenya's Agriculture Ministry said the national stock of maize - the country's staple - is expected to be about 5.9 million 90kg bags by the end of July, adequately covering only 1.7 months beginning in August.

The April–September 2011 Food Security Outlook by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) forecast that most households in the hard-hit pastoral areas would become extremely food insecure and many more livestock would die.

According to WFP, the Horn of Africa drought, which began with the failure of the short rains in December 2010, is the first since a two-year regional drought in 2007-2009 that saw the number of people needing humanitarian assistance in the region rise to more than 20 million.

Conflict could further increase the number of people requiring help. In early May, dozens of people were killed and others displaced when violence broke out on the Ethiopia-Kenya border between two communities over rising food prices.

The fighting between the Turkana community of Kenya and the Merille of Ethiopia, local media reported, reflected a broader pattern of inter-ethnic conflict resulting from food scarcity and persistent drought.

On 15 May, international NGO CARE called for more attention to severe food insecurity in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, saying almost eight million people in these countries needed emergency aid.

"Chronic vulnerability, poverty, social injustice and climate change are all responsible for recurring food insecurity in the Horn of Africa," Mohamed Khaled, CARE's regional emergency coordinator for East Africa, said in a statement. "On top of that, a significant increase in food and fuel prices has worsened the current situation.

"In Kenya, for example, the price of maize, a staple food, has increased over 27 percent during the last three months. Sufficient attention is needed now to prevent further loss of lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the underlying reasons need to be tackled to break the recurring cycles that have persisted in recent years."

Djibouti and Somalia have declared the drought situation a national disaster while the Ethiopian government revised its humanitarian requirements document in April 2011 to reflect the growing needs and mobilize a scale-up of humanitarian response.

Khaled said: "While governments of the affected countries have already started interventions, short- and long-term international assistance is needed to help address critical needs but also underlying structural causes and chronic vulnerabilities. What is needed is a set of interventions which strengthens people’s own resilience capacity and coping mechanisms to survive such severe conditions while at the same time responding to their current humanitarian needs and protecting their livelihoods. It is crucial that people can feed themselves through their own means instead of being dependent on food distributions."

Somalia

Somalia's situation is dire as conflict continues. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Security, Nutrition and Analysis Unit (FSNAU), some 2.4 million Somalis are in food crisis, representing 32 percent of the population.

The effects of the ongoing drought, deteriorating purchasing power, rampant conflict and limited humanitarian space continue to aggravate the situation in most parts of the country, FSNAU said in an April update.

New Food Security Project map from InterAction

InterAction has a great new tool on their website that helps to show the many food security programs around the world. The Food Security Map is an interactive tool that organizes all of the food and agriculture programs by country, the organization giving the aid, and a description of each project.

For example, you can click on the country Mauritania and see where the food security programs are concentrated at and a brief description of their work. In Mauritania ,World Vision conducts two out of the three programs, one providing support to farmers and another that helps to develop an entire community.

InterAction hopes the map will begin to create more cooperation between their member charities. They also hope that it will give donors more information on how to give to specific projects.

One striking bit of information found from this map is the glut of programs going on in Haiti. The map displays 104 different food security projects in the tiny island nation. The only other nation with that many is Bangladesh. Many say that it is the overwhelming amount of humanitarian aid received that keeps the nation from ever becoming self-sufficient. This map might give more evidence to that point of view.

The Food Security Map can be found at InterAction by hitting this link. Below is a screen-shot of the map.

Food can overthrow a government

Just a couple of years ago, Madagascar went through an overthrow of government that was caused by a lack of food. Half of the country is chronically malnourished despite having enough farm-able land to feed all of the people. The ruling government however was leasing half of that land to the company Daewoo. The people grew tired of seeing food grown for South Koreans instead for themselves and revolted.

From this Christian Science Monitor article that we found at MinnPost, writer Scott Baldauf gives us this background on Madagascar and on other so-called "land-grabs" throughout Africa.

Madagascar looks quite unlike the lush tropical paradise portrayed in the Disney movie of the same name. In the dry season, viewed from a plane at 36,000 feet, the island off the southeast coast of the African mainland looks like a giant plate of potatoes au gratin. Every square inch of the island – an area roughly the size of Texas – is chopped up into small, overlapping, often parched, dust-colored terraced plots.

Farmed for centuries by traditional slash-and-burn techniques, Madagascar's soil is depleted, and the pressure of a growing population – now 19 million – means that farmers must struggle to feed more people with less fertile land.

How large well-funded corporate commercial farms can make a go of land that small subsistence farmers have given up on is a story of 20th-century farming technology and 21st-century venture capital funds. Like the green revolution, which favored those with access to modern tractors and irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and specialized seeds, today's corporate farming groups like Daewoo have the technology and financial backing to make unused land bloom.

Without much of that kind of investment, Madagascar is a net food importer, with 40 to 50 percent of the population, by UNICEF estimates, suffering chronic malnutrition, even during good harvests.

"In some areas, people go without their main food staple, rice, for four to six months," says Patrice Charpentier, project manager for food security at Land O'Lakes, an aid group. "Production is erratic. People don't want to overproduce if they're not sure they can sell it on the market. So they produce just enough to survive."

In an average year, people are able to make do with the rice they have saved up and fruit they find in the wild. But the boom-and-bust period of 2007-08 was no average year. Driven by the pell-mell growth of China and India, which demanded increasing fuel and raw materials, crude oil prices surged upward.

The price spike was a temptation for large agricultural companies to divert corn intended for food staples like cornmeal into more profitable biofuels like ethanol instead. It was classic supply-and-demand economics, and it sparked a land rush to buy up farmland across Africa.

But for the ordinary African consumer, it was a disaster. Corn prices jumped 119 percent from June 2007 to June 2008.

The economic collapse in the United States and much of Europe helped to cool things off, but the sleepy world of African subsistence farming had changed forever: The 21st-century African land rush had begun.

The World Bank estimates that worldwide, 115 million acres of land are leased to foreign investors, and the bulk of that is in Africa. A small sampling of countries targeted by foreign agricultural investors documented in the past five years by the International Food Policy Research Institute includes:

Democratic Republic of Congo: 7 million acres secured by the Chinese firm ZTE to grow oil palm for bio­fuels; and 24.7 million acres offered to the South African farmers' union, AgriSA.

Mozambique: Nearly 250,000 acres secured by the Swedish firm Skebab to produce biofuels.

Tanzania: Nearly 1.25 million acres requested by the Saudi Arabian government for food production; more than 110,000 acres purchased by the British firm CAMS Group for biofuels made from sweet sorghum.

Sudan: 1.7 million acres secured by the South Korean government to grow wheat; nearly 1 million acres secured by US-based Jarch Capital; nearly 75,000 acres secured by the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development to grow corn and alfalfa.

Ethiopia: More than 32,000 acres secured by the German firm Flora EcoPower to produce biofuels.

Not all deals are made alike, to be sure. Deals on leased farmland to produce food do manage to create jobs and can also help to transfer state-of-the-art farming skills, such as erosion control, to the local farm-labor force. Deals to grow crops for biofuels sometimes also involve simple refining, which also creates jobs. But many land deals are decidedly one-sided, with all food produced sent away for export

"Setting aside the 'you're selling our land' histrionics," says a Western diplomat who has closely studied Madagascar's agriculture sector, "I think that countries of Africa would benefit from foreign investment by creating low-end jobs, some of it on larger commercial plantations and even some on the small-holder farms."

Food insecurity tightens its hold in Madagascar

From IRIN, a story on the third failed harvest in a row for Madagascar.

In parts of Madagascar's drought-prone south people have resorted to eating cattle-feed, as successive years of crop failures and the current lean season give food insecurity a firmer grip on the region.

"For some time now people have been changing their eating habits, with many eating red cactus that is usually given to cattle, or tamarind mixed with water and earth," said Harinesy Rajeriharineranio, southern Madagascar coordinator for Actions Socio-Sanitaire et Organisation Secours (ASOS), an NGO focused on health and sanitation, based in the southeastern city of Fort Dauphin.

About 720,000 people are facing food insecurity after a third successive year of adverse weather and an increasing "decapitalization" - selling off livestock and possessions as a survival measure - of the rural economy in the south.

The World Food Programme (WFP) in Madagascar said drought had caused the widespread failure of maize crops in the southern regions of Atsimo Andrefana, Androy and Anosy to fail. The lean season, when the previous harvest has been consumed and the new crops are not yet ready, runs from October to about March.

"Through reports from local partners since the beginning of the lean season in October, we know people have already started adopting negative coping strategies such as eating their own seeds, and foodstuffs which are damaging to their health, and selling their goods... men [are] migrating from these areas, leaving women and children even more vulnerable," Krystyna Bednarska, WFP's country representative, told IRIN.

"Two consecutive years of crop failure might lead to a quick deterioration of the food insecurity situation in an area which is already extremely and historically vulnerable," she said.

There was a similar scenario in 2009, but the necessary implementation of large-scale emergency and nutritional interventions were not taken in time because of a lack of funding, Bednarska said.

In March 2009, current President Andry Rajoelina and elements of the army took power from former President Marc Ravalomanana, and international development aid rapidly dried up.

Southern poverty

Before Rajoelina assumed power, donor funding accounted for about 70 percent of government spending, but all ministries faced budget cuts of around this size in a revised budget in September 2010.

Traditionally, Madagascar's poorer and geographically isolated south has been relatively neglected by the political power base, mainly in the north, where the capital, Antananarivo, is located.

Nearly 70 percent of Malagasy live below the poverty line, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), but the number of poor tends to rise the further south you go, where most people depend on subsistence farming.

John Uniack Davis, country director at CARE International, which works to reduce poverty, said anecdotal evidence from the affected regions was that cattle normally selling for US$250 in the post-harvest period were priced at $62.50 in the lean season, or were being bartered for 250kg of cassava, rather than the usual price of 450kg.

He told IRIN that decapitalization was being used as a coping strategy and "[households] are being stretched to the limit."

The Malagasy government's Early Warning System (SAP), which started monitoring food insecurity in the arid south in 1996, said 53 communes were food insecure in August 2010, compared to 45 in August 2009 and 31 in August 2008.

USAID's Madagascar Mission Director, Rudolph Thomas, told IRIN after a visit in October 2010 "When you look out at the land it's very barren, there's very little grass and there's an occasional tree off in the distance. In fact, where there were riverbeds it's bone dry - there's just no water."

Thomas said USAID's $90 million programme for 2010 - when there were "two cyclones, two droughts, a coup and a locust infestation" - was the biggest in 20 years, with a $3 million donation to the WFP emergency programme, and $2 million to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for locust prevention.

Heavy rains

Late and unusually heavy rains in the south were predicted to continue, but this could hinder rather than help the region's food security situation, the representative of the National Office for Natural Disasters Preparedness (BNGRC), Louis De Gonzague Rakotonirainy, told IRIN.

Lundi Peyrol, head of local NGO Let's Develop Madagascar (Hiaraka Hampandroso) based in Ampanihy, in the southwest, said the area had experienced four days of continuous rain and feared another week would destroy any chance of a harvest.

"There's been very little harvesting apart from a bit of maize, and at the moment there is rain, but if this continues it could damage crops and we could have no harvest at all," he said.

"The roads are almost cut... we risk being cut off from Tulear [main port city on the southwestern coast], and prices of essential goods on the market could go up even further," he said. Basic commodities were already about 50 percent more expensive in the south than in other parts of Madagascar due to its isolation, lack of markets and transport costs.

ASOS coordinator Rajeriharineranio said heavy rains in the vicinity of Fort Dauphin had already affected transport links - "Instead of taking trucks two to three days to come from central cities with supplies, it is now taking a week."

In the affected areas 300,000 children younger than five were at risk of severe acute malnutrition if action was not taken, said Bruno Maes, UNICEF's country representative.

Around 90 percent of Madagascar's children did not have access to clean drinking water at home, and "Just over 50 percent of children are stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition," he said. "This rate is among the highest in the world - the situation is only worse in Afghanistan and Yemen."

Feeding the most populous nation in the world

The most populous nation in the world faces a tough challenge in feeding its people. What has made matters worse for China is the loss of farm-able land due to urbanization. Some observers says the need for feeding China's billion people is behind the land grabs in Africa.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Mitch Moxley explores the unique challenges in food production that face China. In addition, Moxley says that China's food security lends to stability for the country's leadership.

Since 1997, China has lost some 8.2 million hectares (20.2 million acres) of arable land to urbanization, industrialization, re-forestation and damage caused by natural disasters. Thirty-seven percent of China’s territory suffers from land degradation and the country’s per capita available land is 40 percent of the world average.

"China has made remarkable economic and social progress over the past three decades, lifting several hundred million out of poverty, and food security has benefited significantly from this overall progress," said Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, when he visited China in December.

"However, the shrinking of arable land and the massive land degradation threatens the ability of the country to maintain current levels of agricultural production, while the widening gap between rural and urban is an important challenge to the right to food of the Chinese population."

The right to food requires people to have incomes that allow them to purchase food, and that food systems be sustainable enough that satisfying current demands does not jeopardize future needs.

"It’s obvious that these two conditions are facing important challenges today," De Schutter said.

Recent food price increases may be a sign of things to come, the UN Rapporteur added, urging China to make the shift to more sustainable types of farming. Without mitigating actions, including a shift to low carbon agriculture, climate change will cause agricultural productivity to drop by five to ten percent by 2030.

In 2010, China recorded its seventh consecutive record grain harvest with production of 546 million tons, according to state media reports. The government has said current grain stocks exceed 200 million tons and that grain self-sufficiency has stood at 95 percent for the last decade.

Worldwatch presents 15 innovations to feed the planet

The Worldwatch Institute has released their annual flagship report on feeding the planet. This year's edition highlights five-teen different innovations in agriculture that could provide more food for the hungry. The innovations include micro-irrigation, "vertical" gardens for city slums, and empowering small farmers to do their own research.

From the Worldwatch Institute, this press release further explains the study. The entire report is available for purchase here, while a summary of the report is available here for a free download.

Report provides a roadmap for food security and agricultural investment, revealing 15 high- and low-tech solutions that are helping to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa

New York, New York (12 January 2011)--Worldwatch Institute today released its report State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, which spotlights successful agricultural innovations and unearths major successes in preventing food waste, building resilience to climate change, and strengthening farming in cities. The report provides a roadmap for increased agricultural investment and more-efficient ways to alleviate global hunger and poverty. Drawing from the world's leading agricultural experts and from hundreds of innovations that are already working on the ground, the report outlines 15 proven, environmentally sustainable prescriptions.

"The progress showcased through this report will inform governments, policymakers, NGOs, and donors that seek to curb hunger and poverty, providing a clear roadmap for expanding or replicating these successes elsewhere," said Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin. "We need the world's influencers of agricultural development to commit to longstanding support for farmers, who make up 80 percent of the population in Africa."

State of the World 2011 comes at a time when many global hunger and food security initiatives--such as the Obama administration's Feed the Future program, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)--can benefit from new insight into environmentally sustainable projects that are already working to alleviate hunger and poverty.

Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution, a large share of the human family is still chronically hungry. While investment in agricultural development by governments, international lenders, and foundations has escalated in recent years, it is still nowhere near what is needed to help the 925 million people who are undernourished. Since the mid-1980s when agricultural funding was at its height, agriculture's share of global development aid has fallen from over 16 percent to just 4 percent today.

In 2008, $1.7 billion in official development assistance was provided to support agricultural projects in Africa, based on statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)--a miniscule amount given the vital return on investment. Given the current global economic conditions, investments are not likely to increase in the coming year. Much of the more recently pledged funding has yet to be raised, and existing funding is not being targeted efficiently to reach the poor farmers of Africa.

"The international community has been neglecting entire segments of the food system in its efforts to reduce hunger and poverty," said Danielle Nierenberg, co-director of Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project. "The solutions won't necessarily come from producing more food, but from changing what children eat in schools, how foods are processed and marketed, and what sorts of food businesses we are investing in."

Serving locally raised crops to school children, for example, has proven to be an effective hunger- and poverty-reducing strategy in many African nations, and has strong parallels to successful farm-to-cafeteria programs in the United States and Europe. Moreover, "roughly 40 percent of the food currently produced worldwide is wasted before it is consumed, creating large opportunities for farmers and households to save both money and resources by reducing this waste," according to Brian Halweil, Nourishing the Planet co-director.

State of the World 2011 draws from hundreds of case studies and first-person examples to offer solutions to reducing hunger and poverty. These include:

* In 2007, some 6,000 women in The Gambia organized into the TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting producer association, creating a sustainable co-management plan for the local oyster fishery to prevent overharvesting and exploitation. Oysters and fish are an important, low-cost source of protein for the population, but current production levels have led to environmental degradation and to changes in land use over the last 30 years. The government is working with groups like TRY to promote less-destructive methods and to expand credit facilities to low-income producers to stimulate investment in more-sustainable production.

* In Kibera, Nairobi, the largest slum in Kenya, more than 1,000 women farmers are growing "vertical" gardens in sacks full of dirt poked with holes, feeding their families and communities. These sacks have the potential to feed thousands of city dwellers while also providing a sustainable and easy-to-maintain source of income for urban farmers. With more than 60 percent of Africa's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, such methods may be crucial to creating future food security. Currently, some 33 percent of Africans live in cities, and 14 million more migrate to urban areas each year. Worldwide, some 800 million people engage in urban agriculture, producing 15–20 percent of all food.

* Pastoralists in South Africa and Kenya are preserving indigenous varieties of livestock that are adapted to the heat and drought of local conditions--traits that will be crucial as climate extremes on the continent worsen. Africa has the world's largest area of permanent pasture and the largest number of pastoralists, with 15–25 million people dependent on livestock.

* The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) is using interactive community plays to engage women farmers, community leaders, and policymakers in an open dialogue about gender equity, food security, land tenure, and access to resources. Women in sub-Saharan Africa make up at least 75 percent of agricultural workers and provide 60–80 percent of the labor to produce food for household consumption and sale, so it is crucial that they have opportunities to express their needs in local governance and decision-making. This entertaining and amicable forum makes it easier for them to speak openly.

* Uganda's Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) program is integrating indigenous vegetable gardens, nutrition information, and food preparation into school curriculums to teach children how to grow local crop varieties that will help combat food shortages and revitalize the country's culinary traditions. An estimated 33 percent of African children currently face hunger and malnutrition, which could affect some 42 million children by 2025. School nutrition programs that don't simply feed children, but also inspire and teach them to become the farmers of the future, are a huge step toward improving food security.

The State of the World 2011 report is accompanied by other informational materials including briefing documents, summaries, an innovations database, videos, and podcasts, all of which are available at www.NourishingthePlanet.org. The project's findings are being disseminated to a wide range of agricultural stakeholders, including government ministries, agricultural policymakers, farmer and community networks, and the increasingly influential non-governmental environmental and development communities.

In conducting this research, Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project received unprecedented access to major international research institutions, including those in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research(CGIAR) system. The team also interacted extensively with farmers and farmers' unions as well as with the banking and investment communities.

The Worldwatch Institute and the Nourishing the Planet project are gratefully supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and additional foundations, governments, and institutions including the Rockefeller and Surdna Foundations, the United Nations Foundation, the Goldman Environmental Prize, the Shared Earth Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund, the Winslow Foundation, and many more.

One bit of criticism has already been posted about the report. Duncan Green, head of research at OXFAM said the following on his From Poverty to Power blog.

Conclusion? ‘If each of their individual innovations were scaled up to bring food to the tables of not one farmer but 100 million or more, as well as to the consumers who depend on them, it could change the entire global food system.’

Wow, that is some ‘if’. And there, depressingly, the report leaves it – no discussion of how such good ideas might actually be adopted, whose interests they serve or undermine, what political or social processes have led to their adoption or abandonment in the past. I get hugely frustrated with this kind of ‘if I ruled the world’ environmentalism – surely we have to go on to think of how such changes might actually take place, rather than be content with ‘hey, we found some organic gardens in Senegal that are more productive than their non-organic neighbour. Job done.’

Food price hikes in Cote d'Ivoire

From IRIN, a story on food price hikes in Cote d'Ivoire.

While political rivals in Côte d’Ivoire trade barbs, diplomats make declarations and regional groups issue warnings, many Ivoirians are eating less so they can feed their children, as prices for basics like cooking oil, rice and flour climb, in some cases doubling.

For now the crunch is hitting mostly poor families, Ivoirians in the commercial capital Abidjan told IRIN. This is a growing population group: In 2008 nearly half of Côte d’Ivoire’s then 20 million people were below the poverty threshold of about US$1.25 per day, compared to about one-third in 2000, and 38 percent in 2002, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“Poverty has increased on a steady trend [in the past 20 years] as a result of the successive socio-political and military crises,” IMF said in a May 2009 country report.

“We’re at the end of our tether,” Françoise Mahan, a midwife in Abidjan’s Abobo District, told IRIN, one month after the presidential run-off election which ended in unprecedented deadlock with two political camps claiming power. Already after the October first round, tensions led to some prices creeping up.

“I can no longer get what I need at the market with 2,000 CFA francs [$4] for my family of three. Now I need about 50 percent more - but at the moment we just can’t afford that.”

Food prices are soaring in Abidjan and other main cities. In the northern city of Odienné and in Gagnoa in central Côte d’Ivoire, before the election crisis a kilogram of sugar cost the equivalent of about $1.25. It now costs $2.40; and the same goes for a litre of cooking oil. A sack of rice now costs around $35 in Odienné and the centre-north city of Korhogo; families could buy the same sack before the political crisis for around $26.

In Abidjan a kilogram of meat cost $2.80 before; now prices range between $4.40 and $5.

As the government of the internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara, called for a nationwide strike to begin on 27 December - to try to force incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo to step down - many Ivoirians are simply trying to make ends meet.

“We heard about the strike call,” said a youth in the central town of Gagnoa. “But it’s the holiday season and some people wanted to come out and try to make at least a bit of money.”

Karim Koné, petrol station attendant in Abidjan’s Adjamé District, said he eats less per day to make whatever food the family has go further. “I’ve started depriving myself of food during the day. I prefer to leave whatever I’d eat in the middle of the day for the family’s evening meal.”

Snowball effect

People’s lack of buying power is hitting vendors and this is having a snowball effect. “Before, I could make about 15,000 CFA francs [$30] a day, but since about a week ago that’s impossible,” said meat vendor in Adjamé Ousmane Diallo. “People just aren’t buying.”

In Abidjan’s wealthier neighbourhood of Cocody, Fatim Touré sat waiting for clients. “Many people just turn around when I tell them the prices,” she told IRIN. “But it’s not the vendors’ fault; with this crisis, hauliers are charging more for moving vegetables into Abidjan.”

She said a sack of aubergines which used to cost her $20, now cost $26.

For now petrol prices, which fluctuate periodically, have not yet risen significantly during the crisis; but chauffeurs told IRIN given the instability fewer drivers are venturing out and transport prices – for both passengers and goods – are up.

“Some of our colleagues have not come out because of the strike,” Abidjan taxi driver Drissa Fofana told IRIN. “But we’ve got to feed our families. The situation is tense so we take the risk; we’ve doubled our tariffs, even if petrol prices have remained the same.”

Cooking fuel is costing families more: In Abidjan a 12-kg bottle of propane gas that went for about $9, now costs about $13. A market vendor in Gagnoa told IRIN charcoal there used to be $10 a sack; now it’s double that.

“Everyone's having a tough time, so one really can’t blame the vendors,” said the mother of seven who sells juices and other items in a Gagnoa market. The crisis has simply worsened what was already a bad situation for her family; she said her husband is unemployed and they cannot afford to put their children in school.

Higher-income families in Abidjan are able to keep extra food at home just in case of further unrest. Some said the most significant impact for now is that they feel confined to their homes.

“Every week we stock up at the supermarket, just in case,” bank executive Bertrand Comoé said. “I don’t allow the children to be out after 6pm. Everyone is home by that hour; it’s like a prison. It’s stressful, but we have to do what we can to avoid the worst.”

A 5 December joint statement by the African Development Bank and World Bank expressed concern about the political situation’s impact on the average Ivoirian. Having re-engaged in Côte d’Ivoire in 2008 after suspending relations in 2004, the World Bank has closed its office in the country and stopped disbursing funds since the election crisis.

“The sustained crisis in Cote d'Ivoire will drive many more Ivoirians further into poverty and hurt stability and economic prosperity in the West African sub-region,” the statement said.