MALNUTRITION: Small farms key to global food security, U.N. says

By Robert Evans 05 Jul 2011

 A farmer transports sacks of freshly harvested rice on a donkey-cart near the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in Kirinyaga district, Kenya, July 23, 2009. REUTERS/Noor Khamis

GENEVA, July 5 (Reuters) - Governments must work towards a major shift towards small-scale farming if endemic food crises are to be overcome and production boosted to support the global population, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
In its annual World Economic and Social Survey, it said a transformation from large-scale and intensive systems of agriculture was vital if growing environmental and land degradation was to be avoided.
The food crisis of 2007-08 and a price spike this year "have revealed deep structural problems in the global food system and the need to increase resources and innovation in agriculture so as to accelerate food production," the survey declared.
Food production, it said, would have to increase between 70 and 100 per cent by 2050 to sustain a world population that would have grown by 35 per cent from the present 6.9 billion to around 9 billion by that time.
"With current agricultural technology, practices and land-use patterns, this cannot be achieved without further contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and land degradation," the survey argued.
In its turn, the resulting environmental degradation would undermine any growth in food productivity.
Of the nearly one seventh of the global population, some 925 million people who are undernourished -- or lacking access to enough food to make possible an active and healthy life -- 98 per cent live in developing countries, according to the survey.Two thirds of them are concentrated in seven countries -- Bangladesh, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. Overall, 578 million are in Asia and the Pacific and 239 million in sub-Saharan Africa.
The worst drought in 60 years in the Horn of Africa has sparked a severe food crisis and high malnutrition rates, with parts of Kenya and Somalia experiencing pre-famine conditions, the United Nations said last week.
The survey said achieving food security would provide a long-term solution to hunger and malnutrition, easing price volatility and protecting the environment.
It would require a radical change in existing policies, but this would result "in a strengthening of currently fragmented systems of innovation and an increase in resources for agricultural development and sustainable resource management."
"The main challenge is to improve incentives so that they promote and lead to the development of sustainable agriculture by small farm holders," said the survey, drawn up by economists in the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
"Evidence has shown that for most crops the optimal farm is small in scale and that it is at this level that most gain in terms of both sustainable productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved."
But to ensure that small farmers were viable, especially in the face of tougher international competitition, strengthening of marketing chains and quality standards, they must have greater access to credits and grants. (Editing by Stephanie Nebehay)
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/small-farms-key-to-global-food-security-un-says/

POVERTY: Ghana: US to assist smallholders’ farmers to escape poverty

11th June 2011
Over 860,000 vulnerable women, children and family members, mostly smallholder farmers, would be assisted over the next five years to improve upon their agriculture production to help fight hunger and poverty.
The programme is under the new US government intervention in agriculture to enhance food security in Northern Ghana.
The programme, which is led by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) leverages the strengths of multilateral institutions, civil society and the private sector to assist 18 million vulnerable women, children and family members.
It would also reach over 324,000 children, improving their nutrition and preventing stunting and child mortality.
The Project known as “Feed the Future” is a 3.5 billion dollar US government’s global hunger and food security initiative, commitment to support country-driven approaches to address the root causes of poverty, hunger and under nutrition.
These is contained in a “Ghana fact sheet” on the “Feed the future” initiative issued by the US embassy in Ghana during the visit of the US Ambassador, Donald Teitelbaum, to Tamale on Thursday, to interact with some of the partners implementing the programme, under the Ghana Agriculture Development and Value Chain Enhancement Program (ADVANCE).
The partners are: Stabic Bank, Ghana Nuts, Karma farms, USAID, Tamale Implement Factory Ltd, and Ghana Grains Council.
The key objective of “feed the future” is to improve the livelihood and nutritional status of households in northern Ghana through: increasing the competitiveness of major food value chains, strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities and households and improving the nutritional status, especially of women and children.
The document noted that Ghana showed an impressive growth and a record poverty reduction over the past twenty years, which made it an African success story with GDP growing from four percent to eight percent annually over the past decade.
This growth, which is expected to continue in the coming years, puts Ghana on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty by half by 2015.
According to the document, Ghana also achieved an overall reduction in poverty rate, from 52 percent to 28 percent over the past ten years, but noted that, despite these progress, the northern part of the country still had poverty rates nearly twice that of the south.
“There is risk that poverty in the north will remain high and the income gap between the north and the south will further widen.
While Ghana has exhibited significant progress in agriculture, it still has a trade deficit of 70 percent in rice and 15 percent in maize, its top two staple crops.
The Consumption of both crops is predicted to grow, with the rise in incomes and high urban growth rate”, the document noted.
http://www.ghananewsagency.org/details/Economics/US-to-assist-smallholders-farmers-to-escape-poverty/?ci=3&ai=29832

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

POVERTY: Another reason to improve small farm output

May 24, 2011
A lot of emphasis has been put on small farmers in the aid world lately, and for good reason. Small farmers grow food for themselves, but any surplus they can later sell to market for extra income. When their yields are bad they can't make any money from their work; or worse yet, they will not be able to feed their families for the year. United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development says that two billion people depend on the crops coming from 500 million small farms.
So the aid world has put a focus on improving the technology, the seeds used and more in hopes to end hunger. We discovered another reason why this is important today from a post at the From Poverty to Power blog. Writer Duncan Green introduces us to a small farmer in Tanzania by the name of Thelezia Salula. She says that it is important to improve the yield and income of small farmers so that future generations can be attracted to farming as a vocation. Without such improvements, they will instead migrate to the cities for work.
More farmers arrive and we move to the partial shade of a leafless tree. The conversation turns to their hopes for their children. Most of them, like poor farmers everywhere, want their kids to study and escape from farming to a ‘good job’ in an office, or for the government. ‘The world is changing, but if they stay in farming their lives won’t change.’ None of their children want to be farmers: ‘no-one will farm when I am old and I will suffer the consequences’, says Thelezia ‘My children will have to pay for labourers to work the farm.’ Farming, it seems, is the last resort when you fail your exams.
But one woman, Salome Luboja, does want her kids to be farmers, and sets out three things that would have to change for that to happen. Firstly, education and knowledge about modern farming methods; second irrigation to safeguard farmers from the vagaries of the newly unreliable rains, and third improved markets and prices. I’m not convinced – towns are just so much more fun than farms, especially for young people – but the women insist that if the facilities were there, the work would not be such a grind, and if the incomes were higher than in the town, the kids would stay on the farm.
I still think many of them will chose to migrate, but if governments and aid donors invest properly in small farmers like Thelezia, (which is one of the things Oxfam is pushing for in the impending Grow campaign, launching on 1 June) at least her children will have a dignified and genuine choice between staying and leaving. That’s only the start though: the flatness of this plain, under a huge sky and scorching sun, seems especially vulnerable to the whims of an increasingly harsh climate. Unless climate change can be controlled too, and people helped to adapt to it, any progress is likely to be short-lived.
http://povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/another-reason-to-improve-small-farm.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FEOch+%28Poverty+News+Blog%29