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.

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Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has met state chief ministers to discuss the country’s rising inflation.

In December prices jumped 7.3 per cent, and it is feared they could rise further over the next few months.

More on this story from Business Week:

India’s food inflation accelerated for a second week, fueling speculation that the central bank may raise interest rates after ordering lenders to keep more cash reserves last week.

An index measuring wholesale prices of lentils, rice, vegetables and other food articles compiled by the commerce ministry increased 17.56 percent in the week to Jan. 23 from a year earlier, following a 17.4 percent gain the previous week. Food inflation reached 19.95 percent in the week to Dec. 5, the fastest pace since December 1998.

Central Bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao has started to withdraw monetary stimulus to prevent consumer demand for goods and services from becoming excessive and adding to inflationary pressure. He increased the proportion of deposits lenders must set aside as reserves on Jan. 29 and economists expect him to raise rates before the next policy announcement in April.

“Inflation is a big problem,” Kevin Grice, an economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London, said before the report. “A hike in policy rates is still imminent.”

Subbarao last week increased the central bank’s inflation forecast for the year ending March 31 to 8.5 percent from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent. He also upgraded the economic growth forecast to 7.5 percent from 6 percent.

Indian stocks fell today. The Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensitive Index slid 0.9 percent at 1:49 p.m. in Mumbai. Ten- year bond yields held near a two-week high.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Shifts in supply and demand, as well as challenges posed by climate change, will exert ever greater pressure on both corporate and national energy planning over the next decades.

What is needed to tackle the interlinked issues of energy security, economic growth and climate change?

Panelists
Fatih Birol, Chief Economist, International Energy Agency, Paris; Global Agenda Council on Energy Security
Robert D. Hormats, US Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs
Lars G. Josefsson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Vattenfall, Sweden
Jim Leape, Director-General, WWF International, World Wide Fund for Nature, Switzerland; Global Agenda Council on Climate Change
Anand Sharma, Minister of Commerce and Industry of India

This panel is moderated by Armen Sarkissian, President and Founder, Eurasia House International, United Kingdom; Global Agenda Council on Energy Security

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In 2008, in the midst of the global food crisis, Al Jazeera travelled to Haiti to look at the politics of rice – how such a fertile country became dependent on food aid. In the wake of this current disaster, that dependence is – initially – going to deepen. But as relief efforts slowly turn to plans for reconstruction, it is important to look back at the policies that brought Haiti to the brink in the first place, and the people who had their own vision of self-sufficiency all along. Avi Lewis talks about the US role in the development of Haiti with PJ Crowley, the spokesman at the US State Department, and Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and an expert on US foreign policy.

The more accepted reasons for Haiti’s enduring poverty have been its internal racial divisions (a small mulatto class dominating a larger negro underclass – in the post independence era some 30,000 mulattos, gens de coleur, usurped power ruling over some 400,00 blacks), the violence of its war for independence that destroyed the economic base of the island and which claimed the lives of one in five Haitians over a 13 year period, the country’s isolation after independence (no one would trade with Haiti until 1821 when Britain finally established ties), political instability, internal divisions, poor governance and above all the crushing indemnity that Haiti agreed to pay France to stave off a second invasion of the country in 1823. Haiti would not finish paying off that debt until 1947.

More recently Haiti’s problem revolve around kleptocratic governance (the Duvalier regimes), the rise of militias as a destabilizing force (political parties in Haiti are little more than armed gangs), overpopulation put pressure on the land and the Reagan/Clinton imposed Washington Consensus that turned Haiti into the most liberalized trade regime in the Western Hemisphere. The tariffs on rice were slashed from 30% to 3% and the result was the destruction of Haiti’s agricultural sector.

Neoliberalism turned Haiti from being self-sufficient in its food production into a basket case dependent on food aid for its survival. Who benefits from this?

Arkansas rice farmers and Tyson foods. (more…)

The President briefs the press on progress made at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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The World Food Programme says that, for the first time, the number of people facing hunger worldwide has topped one billion, but who is to blame for this and what can be done to stem the flow of starvation?

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From All Africa:

Kenya is among countries that will be hardest hit by even more severe food shortages in coming years due to a warming climate.

Some parts of the country have already lost 90 per cent of their water.

Although almost every part of the country had lost substantial amounts of water, the hardest hit areas are Eastern and North Eastern provinces.

Sections of Central Province have lost 80 per cent of their water, while in the western region, 30 per cent of water sources have dried up.

These damning disclosures emerged yesterday during the launch of the annual World Development Report at the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Nairobi offices.

The World Bank report, whose theme this year is “Development and Climate Change”, was launched simultaneously in Nairobi and Washington and painted a gloomy picture of Earth’s future.

The disasters associated with a warming climate, such as droughts, floods and landslides, are already seeing governments diverting funds meant for health and education, says the report, whose Kenyan launch was presided over by Environment minister John Michuki.

Such diversion could involve buying relief food or buying weak animals from desperate herdsmen as is happening in most arid areas in Kenya.

Also under threat are the country’s efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals and the Vision 2030.

Indicating that the government had thought about these challenges, Mr Michuki said the Vision 2030 document was being revised to factor in the anticipated effects of climate change.

“Our plan at the ministry is to spend over Sh80 billion for the next 20 years in tree planting, with the priority going to restoring major water catchment areas,” said the Environment minister.

Even if mitigating factors are put in place today, said the World Bank, the environment would still need many more years to recover.

The study predicts that whole parts of the continent will become unsuitable for wheat farming because of droughts, pests and diseases.

This year, wheat-growing areas of the Rift Valley are facing their lowest production levels ever, with some farmers losing whole crops to drought and pests.

At best, scientists predict that if warming could be retained at two degrees centigrade, weather patterns would change completely, disorienting farmers from their traditional farming instincts.

The report warns people living in coastal areas that water levels could rise by one metre this century, casting doubt on the value of seafront properties.

People living inland, especially around Lake Victoria, require special attention because the speed at which forests are being destroyed could see the lake lose 50 per cent of its species within decades.

Though the report, built on three themes dominating the climate change debate – inertia, equity and ingenuity – paints a dark future, it is optimistic that the situation can be arrested.

It suggests that if people were to give up the use of environment-polluting SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) for environment-friendly saloon cars, it could greatly cut on greenhouse gases in the environment.

But environmentalist Wangari Maathai went further and called for the banning of importation of second hand-cars.

Another suggestion was for the governments to innovatively levy a green tax on foods whose production contributes to greenhouse gases, such as meat.

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Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has declared a state of national calamity because so many citizens do not have food or proper nutrition.
It is estimated that some 54,000 families are struggling to feed their children.

A severe drought and a reduction in the amount of money sent back by people working overseas is being blamed for the crisis. Changing weather patterns and a slowdown in remittances sent from the US are being blamed for the situation. More from the BBC:

Guatemala has been hit by severe food shortages, with some 54,000 families living in the east of the country facing a critical situation.

President Alvaro Colom last week declared a “state of public calamity” to try to mobilise funding to tackle severe food shortages in the country.

Lida Escobar is a field monitor for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) in Guatemala. She sent this update on the situation there to BBCMundo.com:

“In the eastern city of Jalapa I was astonished by what I saw. There were many many children with severe malnutrition problems. We found 22 children with marasmus and kwashiorkor [two nutrient deficiency diseases] in the hospital.

Kwashiorkor is a type of malnutrition in which the children swell because they retain liquids because of protein deficiency.Their hair can also become discoloured and they develop some skin lesions.

Marasmus is another form of malnutrition in which the skin barely covers the bones because of a protein and calories deficiency. The children become very thin, lose hair and can become very irritable.

In Jalapa, the children are not only suffering from malnutrition but they also have to fight other diseases like bronchial pneumonia, gastrointestinal problems and diarrhoea. They lose their appetites and their bodies don’t absorb the nutrients when they eat. As their body defences are low, they get sick very easily.

I also went to Chiquimula, in the town of Jocotan. I visited two nutritional treatment centres which have been treating children from the indigenous area known as Chorti.

We found eight children recuperating there, most of them with Marasmus and Kwashiorkor. The crisis has very complex causes.

Some children have developed these conditions because of the lack of food, but some because they have related diseases and are weak.

The mothers say the children have fever and nausea and that, since they are not hungry, they don’t give them anything to eat.

The Chorti community have access to medical services through non-governmental organisations contracted to the ministry of health.

To reach them, you have to drive and the walk for two hours through a mountainous area.

In some cases there is help available, but there are problems with education.

We found one girl that was very cold and about to die.

We asked the mother why she hadn’t taken her to the centre and she replied that they only take their children to the centre when the local shaman cannot do anything else to help.

In the most vulnerable areas, the WFP helps with a project in which we exchange food for work.

This gives the community an opportunity to work in projects like soil conservation, reforestation, growing vegetable, fertilising and training.

We also provide young children, lactating mothers and pregnant women with Vitaceral, which is a mixture of corn with fortified soy, micronutrients and fortified biscuits.

It’s very sad to see the children with marasmus and kwashiorkor.

They just stare into space and it makes you wonder what they are looking at. What is their future? What are they thinking about?”

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The Afghan people are often caught in the crossfire of the war. Adding to the violence, the country now finds itself in a battle against hunger.

A new report from the humanitarian organization Oxfam says that a third of the population is now at risk of hunger, and aid has been insufficient.

Shannon Scribner, a senior policy advisor on humanitarian issues for Oxfam America, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the dire situation facing much of the Afghan population.

The press release from Oxfam America:

Too few ordinary Afghans are benefiting from international aid efforts in their country, with a third of the population at risk of hunger, international aid agency Oxfam warned today.

The agency said although billions of pounds have been given to Afghanistan as aid, it has been woefully insufficient to deal with legacy of three decades of conflict and chaos.

The US spends $100m a day on security but the overall aid budget for all donors combined is less than $7m a day.

Aid can make a huge difference in Afghanistan but it has to be well-spent. The election of a new government in Kabul must be accompanied by major reforms in governance and aid effectiveness, Oxfam said today. So far much of the money given by foreign governments is ineffective, uncoordinated or wasteful, and doesn’t reach ordinary Afghans.

Grace Ommer, Oxfam GB’s country director for Afghanistan, said: “The problems in Afghanistan are huge but they aren’t intractable. Much has improved since 2001. More children are in school, health facilities are better and the infrastructure is slowly improving. But Afghanistan should and could be doing much better than it is.”

Poverty levels remain some of the worst in the world, with 40% of Afghans living below the poverty line. One woman dies every 30 minutes due to pregnancy or childbirth.

After nearly eight years of Western presence in Afghanistan, Oxfam said many areas are facing severe food shortages with nearly 7.3m people at risk of hunger. The situation is made worse by the conflict which places many areas off limits to aid workers.

Ommer said: “The international community has promised a lot to the Afghan people but much aid and reconstruction have failed to live up to those promises. Donors have double pledged funds and have been slow to disburse aid money, a situation compounded by inefficiency, lack of accountability and corruption. Aid that does reach Afghanistan often doesn’t reach the people it’s meant to help, or it is spent on projects which fulfil donor’s priorities, rather than Afghan needs.”

Despite all these problems the people of Afghanistan still need our help.

Ommer added: “Vast amounts of aid money are funnelled through Provincial Reconstruction Teams – military-dominated institutions that are ill-equipped do aid work. In many parts of Afghanistan this militarization of aid work is not promoting development or stability and is drawing civilians further into the conflict. More of the money should go through local institutions and communities, or to aid agencies, who often have greater impact and efficiency.”

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