MALNUTRITION: SOUTH AFRICA: Too much maize

  Photo: IITA:  Maize production has been booming in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG, 13 January 2011 (IRIN) - After a record maize harvest, a bid by South African farmers to form a pool to export the surplus – enough to feed its food insecure neighbours, Swaziland and Lesotho, for several years – has raised questions about the future of the crop and the manufacture of biofuel.
The country’s Competition Commission rejected the bid on 11 January. "We wanted to start a debate in the country. Surpluses of this magnitude are unusual; food prices are going up globally. We have suggested the farmers consider storing the surplus,” the Commission's Oupa Bodipe told IRIN.
“In the long run they should look at growing maize more for animal feed, or at alternative crops such as sunflower for oil." He said the surplus should challenge the government and the agriculture sector to broaden their options and suggested the farmers consider using the surplus to manufacture biofuel.
South Africa has produced surpluses for several years. The Competition Commission said the farmers' plan to take the latest surplus off the market would raise the price of maize-meal – a staple food in South Africa – and make animal feed more expensive.
Commercial farmers harvested more than 12.8 million tonnes of maize in the 2009/10 season – the biggest crop in three decades – but local annual consumption of between eight million tonnes and nine million tonnes will leave a surplus of about four million tonnes. Lesotho consumes about 344,000 tonnes per year and Swaziland 140,000 tonnes.
The Competition Commission acknowledged that "The existence of the surplus may well result in lower-than-expected returns to farmers, and financial difficulties for some. Ultimately, this may negatively affect the country's productive capacity of maize in the long run."
Johan Willemse, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of the Free State, said the Competition Commission did what it was mandated to do - take steps to keep food prices down - but it had brought the focus on the government to firm up its commitment to agriculture.
"With the inability to find other markets outside South Africa, the long-term effect will be that farmers are going to plant less, as dictated by the domestic market," he noted.
Poor agricultural infrastructure also limited access to domestic and regional markets. "It is ironical, when we have such a massive surplus, that poor communities in poor provinces such as the Eastern Cape do not have access to cheap maize because of the poor roads - in fact, Eastern Cape does not even have a maize-milling plant," Willemse said.

End of the road for maize?
The existence of the surplus may well result in lower-than-expected returns to farmers, and financial difficulties for some
Investment in better crop varieties over the years had doubled yields per hectare and maize production in South Africa had "saturated", said John Purchase, chief executive officer of the Agricultural Business Chamber.
Maize prices had remained consistently low but there was scope for investment to broaden local markets. "Maize within South Africa was still cheaper than globally, even during the hike in 2008,” he noted.
“Unfortunately, it has not meant cheaper maize-meal – consumed by most of our people – because of added costs such as fuel and energy, which have remained high, but maize-meal prices are still cheaper in South Africa, compared to the rest of Africa," Purchase said.
Maize accounts for 70 percent of the country's grain production and covers 60 percent of its cropping area. Purchase and other representatives of the agriculture sector are debating how to deal with the future of maize - the backbone of the sector.
According to the International Food Policy research Institute (IFPRI), South Africa produces half of Southern Africa's maize, the main staple food in the region.
But as maize harvests have improved in other Southern African countries like Malawi and Zambia, which have also reaped surpluses, demand for the staple has shrunk. Besides, South Africa mainly produces genetically modified maize, which has few takers.
Maize exports have also been hit by the strong rand, which dropped from around R8 to the US dollar at the beginning of 2010 to about R6.80 at present.
Purchase said they were considering growing maize for markets outside the continent. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted in its latest update that the Republic of Korea was the top importer of South African maize in 2010.
Kobus Laubscher, head of Grain SA, the agricultural body that applied to the Competition Commission, said they appreciated the debate on the future of maize farming getting underway. Lower prices and the inability to sell the surplus had been discouraging some farmers.
FAO said preliminary estimates indicated that the area planted to maize in South Africa was likely to decline by about 10 percent compared to 2010 levels.
"We urge the government to come up with alternatives, including a biofuel strategy which calls for the mandatory blending of biofuel [with retail petrol or diesel]," Laubscher said.
South Africa does not allow staple grains such as maize to be used for the production of biofuel, but has announced ratios for blending biofuel with commercially sold fossil-fuel based petrol and diesel.
This is not mandatory as it is in Malawi, which has been using ethanol-blended fuel since the energy crisis in the early 1970s.
South Africa's agriculture minister, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, recently said the government should review its biofuel policy.

The rationale for the pool
The Commission was more optimistic. "The surplus in itself is not indicative of an industry in decline. Surpluses and deficits arise due to changing market circumstances, and markets adjust accordingly. There is no evidence that this industry cannot survive such an adjustment."
Ronald Ramabulana, chief executive officer of the National Agricultural Marketing Council, agreed, saying the situation was temporary. "With farmers planting less, the supply in the market will reduce and the situation will correct itself."
Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains at FAO, said he was concerned about the impact of the Commission's decision on the farmers, and that it could disrupt maize supplies in the long run. "But the commission must have done its own cost benefits analysis for the country."
The farmers' desire to form an export pool was prompted by two reasons: "One was to ring-fence the four million [tonne surplus], hoping it would then probably push prices to a level which could help them," said Willemse.
The other reason was that it was beyond any farmer's capacity to export such a quantity on his own. "It now time for the government to seriously engage with the farmers," Purchase suggested.
In the past few days agriculture minister Joemat-Pettersson has been travelling to various provinces to meet with commercial farmers.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91615

MALNUTRITION: Please manage the food better

JOHANNESBURG, 24 June 2010 (IRIN) - A new global architecture to govern food security is urgently needed to reduce the number of hungry people, and predict and prevent another food price crisis like the one that took the world by surprise in 2006-08. Shenggen Fen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank, urged leaders of the G8 industrialised countries and G20 emerging countries, who will be meeting in Canada for two days from 25 June, to focus on this issue."The existing governing systems, and even countries, failed to predict the [food price] crisis in 2007/08," and ever more people have been going hungry since then, he told IRIN.The food price crisis and the recession that followed pushed the number of malnourished men, women and children to more than one billion in 2009, according to UN agencies, and the figure is still growing. "Hunger has been much more pervasive than poverty ... If past trends continue, global food security will deteriorate even further," warned an IFPRI report on meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger, called Business As Unusual, written by Fen and released on 23 June."While food prices have dropped, incomes because of the recession have been reduced by a much higher rate," said Holger Matthey, an economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).The G8 countries pledged US$22 million to tackle global hunger at their 2009 meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, "But we don't know how much of that money has come through," said Fen, who proposed setting up a tracking system to monitor funds for reducing hunger. IFPRI uses its Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) to monitor funding for agriculture in Africa. "We could maybe expand this system to cover global flows," Fen suggested.After the 2006-08 crisis, when staples such as maize, rice and wheat climbed to their highest prices in 30 years, many donor countries, aid agencies and analysts suggested that the existing Committee on World Food Security (CFS) be reformed.The CFS is a technical committee of the FAO, and serves as a forum in the UN system for the review and follow-up of policies on world food security, food production, nutrition, and physical and economic access to food.Jacques Diouf, director-general of FAO, announced last week that the CFS was being reformed to make it a "global platform for policy convergence and the coordination of expertise and action in the fight against hunger and malnutrition in the world".Fen said the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, set up after the crisis, had done a "good job" in coordinating initiatives to respond to the crisis. "But that task force also needs support - it needs current information from policy institutes such as IFPRI and other academics; there needs to be more information-sharing between governments and organizations to make this work."Another crisis?Uncoordinated policy actions of governments across the world during the 2006-08 food crisis made prices even more volatile and affected access to markets, said a new joint Agricultural Outlook for the next 10 years, produced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and FAO. Food prices have come down, but are still high, according to FAO.The Outlook acknowledged that the 2006-08 food price crisis "was due to the contemporaneous occurrence of a panoply of contributing factors, which are not likely to be repeated in the near term. However, if history is any guide, further episodes of strong price fluctuations in agricultural product prices cannot be ruled out, nor can future short-lived crises". High crude oil and energy prices were major contributors to forcing up food prices in 2006-08. Fossil fuel and energy prices not only affect the cost of agricultural inputs, but expand the quantity of agricultural land being diverted to produce grain for biofuel. "Crude oil and energy prices are assumed to increase over the coming decade as global economic activity is restored," the Outlook commented. Burgeoning demand for milk and meat in emerging economies like China and India also puts pressure on the amount of staple grains diverted to animal feed. Besides higher population growth rates - two percent per year in Africa - high urbanization trends and a large emerging middle class will drive demand for food.The OECD/FAO projected that staples like wheat would cost 15 percent to 40 percent more from 2010 to 2019 than they did from 1997 to 2006.Merritt Cluff, a senior FAO economist who led the Outlook research team, advised food aid agencies to "source food purchases locally where possible ... [so] that local rural communities receive higher payments for their commodities and stimulate production". Numbers of hungry growing The task of halving the number of hungry from 1990 levels by 2015, as required by the MDG, has grown - the world will have to help 73 million people out of hunger every year to reach the MDG target. To help achieve this, Fen suggested that countries scale up investment in agriculture and social protection - a twin-track approach proposed by the UN task force in the wake of the 2006-08 crisis.A study Fen conducted in China showed that for every $1,200 spent on agricultural research in 2000, 11 people were lifted out of poverty; in Uganda, for every additional $920 invested in agricultural research in 1999, 58 people were lifted out of poverty.It paid to concentrate on country-led, bottom-up approaches to making people food secure by involving local governments and seeking broad participation; if countries could not afford agricultural reforms, the private sector should be brought in. Fen urged countries to experiment with new policies and expand successful pilot initiatives, saying: "Scale up the unusual." The IFPRI report noted that in Kenya, where the Business Alliance Against Chronic Hunger launched its first pilot programme in 2009, more than 30 private companies had become members. According to local news reports the initiative had helped more than 2,000 farmers.Worldwide, food markets remain volatile. In 2006-08 prices were "exacerbated by trade policies of exporters, creating higher import prices", said FAO's Cluff. No trading system could ensure that people would get "cheap food, but net importers deserve to have unrestrained access to markets on a predictable and fair basis". Cluff suggested that developing countries put in place well functioning markets, and establish commodity exchanges to make "price discovery more transparent and fair".

MALNUTRITION: Food prices rising

There are indications that most African countries would be faced with the challenge of child malnutrition in the nearest future if urgent steps are not taken to arrest the ugly situation. Malnutrition is described as a state of illness or weakness which occurs as a result of being malnourished, while malnourishment is also a state of not eating enough or good food.
Hikes in Food Prices
The current food price hikes in the continent is not helping matters at all as it further helped in raising micronutrient deficiencies, with its negative consequences such as impaired cognitive development, lower resistance to disease, and increased risks during childbirth for both mothers and children.
These are part of the research findings released recently by the United State (US) based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) at the annual general meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which works to achieve sustainable food security and reduce poverty in developing countries through scientific research.
It needs to be pointed out, that the research focused on the double impact of the food price and financial crises on agriculture and the poor in the Mozambican capital, Maputo and it noted that at present most African countries are trying to cope with the food price crisis that began in 2007 with the onset of the global economic slowdown, which has hammered the already reduced spending power of the poor.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5890405-african-countries-facing-the-challenge-of-infant-malnutrition