MALNUTRITION: Guatemala: Food insecurity

Jun 03, 2011

Nearly half of young children in Guatemala suffer from chronic malnutrition and following the failure of legislation meant to increase local food production, the number looks set to rise.
As part of its new ‘Grow’ campaign, Oxfam has been highlighting the desperate situation of the poor in Guatemala, who already spend 70 per cent of their income on food. And with the country increasingly reliant on imports of staple foods, Guatemalans are struggling to provide for their families.
Part of the problem is that large areas of Guatemala’s land are devoted to cash crops for export, such as as coffee, sugar-cane and cotton. A few years ago, campaigners for the advancement of Guatemala’s poor put their hopes in legislation which would have required landowners to allocate a tenth of arable land for planting grains. However, this legislation was squashed by powerful land-owning elites. In Guatemala, around two-fifths of land is owned by less than 8 per cent of agricultural producers. Small farmers also receive low prices from supply chains and legislation to try and redress the balance was also dropped.
This week the Guardian reports on a new threat to local food production in Guatemala – the global demand for palm oil. According to the National Institute of Agrarian and Rural Studies in Guatemala City, the area of land taken up by palm plantations increased over 140 per cent between 2005 and 2010. With biofuel schemes attracting around 20 billion dollars each year in subsidies from western governments, palm oil fetches a high price for use in agrofuels. Vast quantities of palm oil are also used by food companies in products such as margarine, chocolate, biscuits and ready-made meals. The World Bank estimates its use in these kinds of processed foods will double between 2000 and 2050 as consumers in developing countries change their eating habits.
The rising demand for palm oil means many Guatemalan growers are abandoning old crops of cotton, cattle and coffee, to grow palm. And there is a grab for more land. Agents for large agribusinesses are reported to be intimidating smallholders to sell or rent out their land for cultivation. Protected wetlands and forests are also being cleared at an increasing rate and rivers are being diverted to irrigate fields of palm trees. Climate experts warn that with extreme weather conditions, rivers may revert to their natural courses washing away any land caught in between.
Oxfam’s country director in Guatemala says that with corn and soya bean production decreasing and little investment to help small farmers, the country is experiencing a food crises, with more than 800,000 Guatemalans suffering from acute malnutrition. The Guatemalan government recognizes the huge level of poverty and hunger faced by its citizens, but so far has proved powerless to implement the deep changes necessary to improve the food situation.
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/food-insecurity-in-guatemala

MALNUTRITION: Pakistan: The heedless rush towards cultivating biofuel crops

The heedless rush towards cultivating biofuel crops in Pakistan is quite liable to exacerbate malnutrition levels which, according to a recent World Food Programme report, have already reach the staggering figure of 21-23 per cent in rural Sindh, figures six to nine per cent above the internationally recognised emergency point of 15 per cent. It is higher than in the vast majority of African countries where globally recognised charities work around the clock struggling to alleviate horrendous nutritional shortcomings.

Malnutrition in Pakistan is not restricted to the millions of flood affected people throughout the country but is also clearly evident, and on the increase, amongst many millions of people with low or negligible incomes for both urban and rural dwellers alike.
According to the oft repeated mantra of the ministry of agriculture ‘there is no shortage of food’ in the country yet. Be this as it may, it is also true that a high percentage of the population can no longer, thanks to rampant inflation, afford to purchase the food on offer. However, this does not automatically give the government, along with indigenous and foreign investors and existing agricultural concerns, the right to switch over from cultivating food crops to crops solely intended for what is currently perceived as a lucrative biofuel market.
The ongoing energy crisis, further fuelled by the lure of carbon credit trading and dreams of profiting from funding promised to ventures intended to combat global warming, is encouraging Pakistani agriculturalists, often working hand in hand with corporate interests and government departments, to stop growing food which is a dangerous trend indeed.
The most talked about biofuel material at present is that of a tropical American plant called Jatropha curcas which is being planted, often illegally by using smuggled seed, by growers in Sindh, Balochistan and in the agricultural heartland of the Punjab with even Pakistan State Oil having jumped on the Jatropha bandwagon by setting up an experimental plantation outside Karachi in recent years.
Entrepreneurs claim that cultivating Jatropha does not infringe of food production in any way as it can be cultivated on marginal, waste and arid land of which, they claim, there is over 80 million acres in the country. What they do not say, quite naturally, is that there are vast numbers of people eking out some kind of living from these lands which are utilised in the production of subsistence crops and for the grazing of livestock. Neither do they publicise the hard fact that whilst Jatropha is claimed to have the ability to produce 10 times for oil than corn, this has not yet been proven on a commercial scale plus, even though it is drought tolerant once established, (this means irrigation is required for young plantations).
Moreover, it needs, according to a Dutch study, five times more water to produce a unit of energy than do either sugarcane or corn and 10 times more water than sugar beet making it, in fact, a rather thirsty crop which, if it doesn’t get adequate moisture, does not produce the anticipated oil for use in biofuels. Thus, it goes without saying, if water was available to be diverted to these 80 million acres of ‘waste’ land, it could be used for increased food production on all levels including that of meat and dairy which are often in short supplies.
There has even been talk of growing Jatropha with financial inputs from South Korea with the crop intended for export and processing there not here which is of no benefit to Pakistan, other than financially, whatsoever. The name ‘Jatropha’ may be familiar to some gardeners as members of this genus, dangerous attractive to mealie bugs which could spread on to other crops, were introduced as ornamentals many years ago.
Second on the booming biofuel cultivation list in Pakistan is the legumus tree Pongamia pinnata, an arid zone, drought tolerant species indigenous to tropical and temperate Asia and from which ‘hongo oil’ has been extracted for thousands of years. But, as with Jatropha, it is necessary to wait a number of years until harvesting can begin which is where other, ‘edible’ dangers arise.
The government is already evaluating the use of sugarcane as a biofuel and if this becomes a reality then sugar prices will surge as availability declines. Other important food crops with important biofuel potential include: canola, soy, rape seed, mustard, palm oil, wheat, corn, sugar beet and sunflower although as perennial grasses are also being examined; livestock and dairy production could also be adversely affected in the long term.
With global food prices at their highest ever, the price of American corn has increased by 79 per cent over the last year as a direct result of much of the crop is now destined for biofuel refineries, the immediate affect has been ‘to push another estimated 44 million people in low and middle-income brackets into poverty’ says the World Bank which is extremely concerned about the potential impact of biofuel production on world food stocks.
http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/17/food-production-the-hazardous-trend.html

POVERTY: Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: 31 January 2011

Political risk has returned with a vengeance. The first food revolutions of our Malthusian era have exposed the weak grip of authoritarian regimes in poor countries that import grain, whether in North Africa today or parts of Asia tomorrow.


As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding. Photo: REUTERS


If you insist on joining the emerging market party at this stage of the agflation blow-off, avoid countries with an accelerating gap between rich and poor. Cairo’s EGX stock index has dropped 20pc in nine trading sessions.
Events have moved briskly since a Tunisian fruit vendor with a handcart set fire to himself six weeks ago, and in doing so lit the fuse that has detonated Egypt and threatens to topple the political order of the Maghreb, Yemen, and beyond.
As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding.
This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations – known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.
In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf. The Brotherhood is of course a different kettle of fish from Iran’s Ayatollahs; and Turkey shows that an ‘Islamic leaning’ government can be part of the liberal world – though Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan once let slip that democracy was a tram “you ride until you arrive at your destination, then you step off."
It does not take a febrile imagination to guess what the Brotherhood’s ascendancy might mean for Israel, and for strategic stability in the Mid-East. Asia has as much to lose if this goes wrong as the West. China’s energy intensity per unit of GDP is double US levels, and triple the UK.
The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.
Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.
The FAO implored goverments to avoid panic responses that “aggravate the situation”. If you are Hosni Mubarak hanging on in Cairo’s presidential palace, do care about such niceties?
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy blames the commodity spike on hedge funds, speculators, and the derivatives market (largely in London). He vowed to use his G20 presidency to smash the racket, but then Mr Sarkozy has a penchant for witchhunts against easy targets.
The European Commission has been hunting for proof to support his claims, without success. Its draft report – to be released last Wednesday, but withdrawn under pressure from Paris – reached exactly the same conclusion as investigators from the IMF, and US and British regulators.
“There is little evidence that the price formation process on commodity markets has changed in recent years with the growing importance of derivatives markets”, it said.
As Jeff Currie from Goldman Sachs tirelessly points out, future contracts are neutral. For every trader making money by going long on wheat, sugar, pork bellies, zinc, or crude oil, there is a trader losing money on the other side. It is a paper transfer between financial players.
You have to buy and hoard the vast amounts of these bulk commodities to have much impact on the price, which is costly and difficult to do, though people do park crude on floating tankers sometimes, and Chinese firms allegedly stashed copper in warehouses last year.
But that is not what commodity index funds with $150bn are actually doing with food, base metals, and energy. Only governments have strategic petroleum and grain reserves big enough to make a difference.
The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest. Russia imposed an export ban on grains. This was compounded by late rains in Canada, Nina disruptions in Argentina, and a series of acreage downgrades in the US. The world’s stocks-to-use ratio for corn is nearing a 30-year low of 12.8pc, according to Rabobank.
The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.
Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable acquivers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.
Can the world head off mass famine? Yes, with leadership. The regions of the ex-Soviet Union farm 30m hectares less today than in the Khrushchev era, and yields are half western levels.
There are tapped hinterlands in Brazil, and in Africa where land titles and access to credit could unleash a great leap forward. The global reservoir of unforested cropland is 445m hectares, compared to 1.5 billion in production. But the low-lying fruit has already gone, and the vast investment needed will not come soon enough to avoid a menacing shift in the terms of trade between the land and the urban poor.
We are on a thinner margin of food security, as North Africa is discovering painfully, and China understands all too well. Perhaps it is a little too early to write off farm-rich Europe and America.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8291470/Egypt-and-Tunisia-usher-in-the-new-era-of-global-food-revolutions.html