The International Red Cross has warned that Zimbabwe could be facing a very severe food crisis.
The charity says that more than 2.7 million people, a quarter of the country’s population, are in “dire need” of food aid.
There are already more than two million people who need food aid in the country and that number is going to rise because the harvest has failed, the group says.
They are appealing for donors to contribute more than $20 million USD in funding.
There is also concern about the possible impact of food shortage on the estimated one million children left orphaned after their parents died of AIDS.
The Dead Sea in Jordan is shrinking at an alarming rate – a development that has led to the creation of some 3,000 sinkholes along the sea’s coasts. Time was when the River Jordan hurled one billion cubic metres of water a year into the sea. The figure now is 10% of that.
Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians – everyone wants a bit of Jordan water – and by the time the river reaches its end, there is almost none left. At its mouth, two strides with rolled up trousers can take you from Israel across the river border into Jordan.
The sea has shrunk by a third since the 1960s when its major water source – the River Jordan – was diverted for upstream projects in Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
But for many people, the projects have backfired and the farmers who work near the sea say the once verdant and fertile land has become increasingly barren.
Global food demand will double between now and 2050 as the world’s population reaches 9.2 billion.
How can the increased demand for food be met in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner?
The Panelists
William H. Gates III, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USA
Ellen Kullman, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, DuPont, USA
Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of Vietnam; Chair, 2010 ASEAN
Patricia A. Woertz, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), USA; Co-Chair of the Governors Meeting for Consumer Industries 2010; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010
This panel is moderated by Prannoy Roy, Chairman, New Delhi Television (NDTV), India.
Economist Felix Salmon of Reuters has a compelling article based on a conversation with Dan Barber, a leader in the locavore movement and the chef of the Blue Hill Farm.
Every so often at Davos you have a short, startling conversation which completely changes the way you think about a subject — and I just had one of those standing next to Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill Farm. He’s a very smart, very funny guy, who’s passionate about food on every level from preparing the ingredients of the dishes in his restaurants to the logistics of feeding the planet.
I bumped into Barber as we were milling around the Davos conference center, waiting for the panel on “rethinking how to feed the world” to begin. I asked him what he thought of the food in Switzerland; he compared in unfavorably to what he was fed by the airline on the way over here. “I haven’t seen a vegetable since Thursday,” he added, looking a bit overwhelmed by the number of things that the Swiss seem to be able to do with bread, cheese, and bit of veal.
When the panel started, I could almost see the steam coming out of Barber’s ears. It featured two heads of state; two agribusiness CEOs; a representative from the World Bank; and Bill Gates. All of them looked at food mainly as a matter of logistics and problem-solving, and they seemed to do so with real good will and good motives. (Well, maybe not the CEO of ADM.) But they were all very much bought into a model which looks, to Barber’s eyes, incredibly shaky.
Essentially the problem is that the people on the panel have internalized the principles of comparative advantage and free trade to the point at which they are more or less incapable of thinking any other way. In a Ricardian world it makes sense for Ohio to overwhelmingly grow corn and soy, since growing corn and soy is what it does best. And because of economies of scale, it makes sense to grow just one type of each, on farms of mind-boggling size. Ohio can then trade all that corn and soy for the food it wants to eat, and everybody is better off.
Except in reality it doesn’t work like that. Monocultures are naturally prone to disastrous outbreaks of disease, which can wipe out an entire crop. The panel at Davos has a favored method of dealing with such things: the development of disease-resistant crop strains, often through high-tech and patentable genetic modification. Bright research scientists create clever transgenic crops, and then people like Bill Gates and the World Bank try to get them broadly adopted while setting well-intentioned staffers to work minimizing potential problems with IP licensing. Innovation through agricultural technology is the obvious and necessary solution to the problem of global hunger.
Barber isn’t anti-science, nor is he anti-innovation. But he knows (and the panelists know too) that a system of globalized agriculture can break down, as we saw during the commodity boom of 2008. As the price of soy and rice and wheat soared, exporters started hoarding rather than selling, and importers couldn’t obtain necessary supplies at any price. As the World Bank’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala noted, Ukraine had 5 million tons of surplus wheat, but the international food markets were very thin, and it was extremely difficult to get that wheat exported. The system didn’t work like it was meant to: when put to a real-world test, it broke down.