MALNUTRITION: Cost of eating spikes for the Arab world

May 20 2011 : Olivia Ward
Let them eat bread. That refrain, from the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak, kept impoverished Egyptians from violent rebellion for decades. When food riots broke out in 2008, he contained them by promising to keep up the subsidies that were the barrier between malnutrition and starvation for one-third of the country’s 80 million people. The protests that brought down his regime were driven by hunger for democracy rather than bread. But as Egypt and other Arab countries remain volatile, there are fears that spiking grain prices could propel new discontent.
In the past week, wheat prices soared by 17 per cent, a worrying sign for those countries where it is a staple of the diet.
The Arab world buys about one-third of all the world’s traded wheat, says the World Bank, and that’s due to rise by 40 per cent over the next decade.

“In the U.S., people eat a lot of bread,” says Rami Zurayk of American University of Beirut, an expert in land and water resources. “But imagine a country where they eat about three times that much."
That would be Tunisia, where the Food and Agriculture Organization reports a total of 216 kilograms of wheat a year consumed by every person.
It is the world’s highest level of wheat consumption, and it far outstrips the U.S. and Canadian total of around 80 kilos a year.
But it isn’t unique in the Arab countries, where poverty is persistent, and bread and wheat products the cheapest way of filling a family’s stomachs.
Algeria’s per capita consumption is 210 kilos per year, and Egypt’s 185.
But Egypt is also the world’s leading importer of wheat, and the new transitional government must cope with escalating prices, along with pressure to continue the subsidies that Mubarak began. It’s a practice that other Arab leaders adopted in the hope of keeping their countries tranquil.
“In Egypt the poor aren’t starving, but they live on bread and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” says Bessma Momani, a senior fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation. “If you take that away, you will have mass starvation.”
A large number of Egyptians, and other Arab citizens, spend most of their income to feed their families, and those at the bottom of the economic food chain feel the pain the most.
The spiking wheat prices should be good news for producers like Canada — which supplies only a fraction of Egypt’s needs, but sends more than 2 million tonnes of wheat to the Arab region, with Iraq Canada’s biggest client.
The prices are a boon to “farmers with grain in their bins,” says the Canadian Wheat Board.
But it cautions, this year “extremely wet growing and harvest seasons across most of the Prairies resulted in below-average production and quality for wheat, durum and barley,” while production of six major grains dropped 20 per cent, with spring wheat grades the lowest since 2004.
For Arab countries that supply wheat to their people at subsidized prices, the picture is worse.
“The politics taking place today makes it hard for them to cut back or re-target their food subsidies,” says Julian Lampietti of World Bank, who led a 2009 study of Arab food security.
But he adds, although the impact on government budgets is significant in some countries, “it’s probably not unmanageable. The combination of high oil and food prices shows a different effect too.”
While oil-importing countries suffer most, producers may balance the books by taking in bigger oil profits. And, Lampietti says, “there is a lot that can be done to cut down the cost of food,” through better management, including a change in the way grain is procured, unloaded and distributed.
But he warns, “I think we are looking at a new normal in prices. They are more volatile and leveling off at higher levels than in the 1990s.”
“Food prices in the past haven’t gone up the way they have in the last two years,” says Evan Fraser of University of Guelph, author of Empires of Food. “We are experiencing an extraordinary series of shocks to the food system.”
Grain reserves were once believed to be the answer, but the expense of stockpiling, and the opposition of the International Monetary Fund — which pushed indebted countries to reduce reserves for “market efficiency” and import grain when needed — has frayed that safety net. So has real estate speculation that gobbled arable land for development.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/994961--cost-of-eating-spikes-for-the-arab-world

MALNUTRITION: science’s last hope may be locked inside Syria's forgotten wild plants.

March 2011by Fiona MacDonal
The world is facing starvation as climate change disrupts food production and the population booms and science’s last hope may be locked inside Syria's forgotten wild plants.

 Credit: Fiona MacDonald
The grounds at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA).

In the midst of a red, rocky stretch of land in the northeast of Syria, hundreds of rows of wheat brace themselves against a hot, dry wind. The plants are separated into small square plots by grassy pathways, ensuring no genetic material is transferred between sets.
At first glance, the dry, yellow crops look identical – they’re the only signs of life for kilometres around. But, in fact, they couldn’t be more different.
Some have grown tall and straight, while others are too wild and ‘hairy’. Some haven’t yet produced seeds, while others are ready to be harvested. Many couldn’t take the heat while a few thrived.
And these differences will determine what many populations will be eating in the next 10 to 20 years, and could decide how many people go hungry as Earth’s population grows.
“We’re looking for the crops that show both heat resistance and high yield,” says Francis Ogbonnaya, a wheat breeder with the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), 30 km south of Aleppo, Syria.
While each plot is genetically different, all of the crops are the result of an arranged marriage between a wild Syrian wheat-relative (which exhibits heat resistance) and a domestic wheat crop from Sudan – a country that loses millions of dollars in crop yield annually due to extreme heat.
When it comes to finding plants that can handle the heat, Ogbonnaya is in the right place. Temperatures in Aleppo exceeded 40˚C almost every day during the 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer. Sometimes, it edged above 46˚C.
Those accustomed to rigorous lab controls may wonder how parameters can be controlled in such a wild environment: what if there’s a cold snap?
“That is one thing we never have to worry about here,” laughs Ogbonnaya, who formerly worked in Australia and continues to collaborate with Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to develop wheat strains suited to the harsh climate.
In the middle of the Arabian desert, it’s not just heat resistance that scientists are searching for: here the crops that will help civilisation survive on a rapidly changing planet are being put to the test.
Researchers have come from all over the world to create crops for the future: wheat that is resistant to drought and salinity, chickpeas that repel fungus and crops with significantly higher yields.
Genetically superior plants couldn’t come sooner – a perfect storm of obstacles is bearing down upon farmers, says Kenneth Street, an Australian agriculturalist and genetic resource scientist at ICARDA. The world’s population continues to grow rapidly, and is estimated that it could hit 10 billion by 2050. And as it is, we can’t feed the mouths we have: in 2010, almost one in seven people on the planet were malnourished.
The problem is not only that we have more mouths to feed, but the fact that everything we need to grow food – water, land, fertiliser – is running out at an alarming rate, stresses Street.
According to the United Nations, the world needs to double its output of food by 2050 in order to avoid global mass starvation; other estimates suggest a four-fold yield boost is needed. But – in line with his brazen and honest nature – Street warns that, the way things are looking now, we’ll be lucky to maintain our current rate of production.
“There’s climate change, our phosphorous is running out, most of the world’s water basins are being sucked dry – those are the three big ones. Then we’ve got competition between biofuels, as well as the problem that modern agriculture is heavily reliant upon fossil fuels – the U.S. alone uses one trillion litres of oil a year to make nitrogen fertiliser. What happens when the oil runs out? We’re also losing something like six billion hectares a year to land degradation, so you add all those things up and it’s scary.”
Climate change in particular is a concern for farmers and agricultural scientists, as it changes entire ecosystems at an unnatural rate – and crops can’t keep up.
It also alters the entire pest and insect game for plants, as species and diseases that were once confined to the tropics expand their reach to affect the rest of the world, adds Street. “I’m glad I’m going to be a really old bastard by the time this storm hits.”
To make matters worse, modern eating habits are becoming increasingly unsustainable. A November 2003 paper in The Journal of Nutrition by Cristopher Delgado of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC concluded that, by 2020, developing countries will eat 107 million tonnes more meat than they did in the late 1990s.
Given it can take over 50,000 L of water to produce 1 kg of beef (compared to around 1,000 L for 1 kg of wheat), this is going to increase pressure on already stressed resources.
The increase in output that we need to feed the growing world has been achieved before during the ‘green revolution’ that began in the early 1940s and continued into the late 1970s.
Led by the late Norman Borlaug, the agriculturalist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for a lifetime of work to feed the hungry, the movement involved rapid increases in wheat yield thanks to improvements in fertiliser, irrigation and breeding techniques. By the end of the 1970s, output in regions such as India had almost doubled – while using the same amount of land.
However, this increase was achieved by deploying weapons which today are less plentiful. “We only increased wheat yield with a lot of inputs – irrigation, fertiliser. We’ve now reached a plateau,” says Muhammad Imtiaz, senior chickpea breeder at ICARDA.
Without being able to increase inputs, the only hope is to improve the crops, says Imtiaz – making them work more efficiently and adapting them to better suit the region they will feed. And the only way to do this without genetically modifying organisms is to create new varieties containing the genes from the ancestors of domestic crops.
And this brings us back to Aleppo. Despite the barren terrain today, some 11,000 years ago Aleppo and most of northern Syria was part of the verdant Fertile Crescent – the region from which modern agriculture emerged. It was here that the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chickpea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch – were first cultivated. And it was here that early humans realised that hunting and gathering might not be the best use of their time, so downed their spears and decided to bring the food to them.
It was in this region that early humans learnt to grow and harvest food – a movement known as the Neolithic revolution. In the thousands of years that followed, humanity changed greatly – and so did the plants we fed on.
In the beginning, agriculture wasn’t overly successful. To ensure they had enough to eat, early farmers chose plants that grew quickly and provided the most food. Through this selective breeding, modern crops were born. And they have served us well.
Yet, buried within the hundreds of thousands of plants that our ancestors didn’t pick (for one reason or another) are genes that have helped these wild plants survive in one of the harshest regions on the planet, enduring droughts, salinity and temperatures ranging from –12˚C to 50˚C. These genes now hold the hopes of scientists around the world and may offer a way to boost the output of regular crops. But thanks to the increasing focus on fewer and fewer higher-yield plants in modern agriculture, these genes – which could well be our saviours in the decades ahead – are fading into the background.
“Over the last 100 years, we’ve lost about 80% of our agricultural biodiversity,” says Street. “What a lot of people argue is that all the useful biodiversity has been captured within modern crop plants. But when you’ve got all the new disease and changes in the ecosystem, you don’t know what is going to come up and what useful biodiversity is there.”
A major part of Street and his team’s work at ICARDA is to go out and collect as many seeds of ancient species as possible and screen them for useful genes – a process that was shown in the 2008 Australian Broadcasting Corporation-screened documentary, Seed Hunter, of which Street was the star.
Usually not one to put himself in the limelight, he was willing to bring attention to a cause he has dedicated his life’s work to. “The whole point of the documentary was us trying to ‘make seeds sexy’, and bring awareness to the problem of diversity loss in crops.
“We rely on too few species – there are something like 20,000 edible species in the world, and we rely on four. And if we’re going to maintain that system, we’re going to need that biodiversity to help the crops evolve.”
Of course changes to ecosystems and new diseases occur regularly, and plants have survived these pressures for hundreds of years, adds Street.
But now the crops that we rely on are genetically uniform compared to their wild relatives and don’t have the capacity to adapt beyond the conditions they were bred for, he says.
“And things are changing so quickly, our crops can’t respond in one generation to the changes. Basically, we have to drive the evolution of our crop plants artificially.”
This process is similar to an online dating service; it collects as many candidate members as possible and then creates the most fruitful matches it can from within the membership.
Even with human intervention, the process is long and slow. First, a scientist needs to select and grow seeds that might display a desirable trait, which can range from flood resistance to the ability tolerate a disease.
This in itself is harder than it sounds. There are approximately six million types of seed contained in more than 1,300 genebanks around the world. Just looking for wheat seeds involves scouring well over 500,000 different seedtypes around the world.
Usually, scientists are given either a random selection of seeds or a core collection – which represents a small selection of seeds housed in the seed bank, and is selected to provide the greatest amount of genetic diversity. The scientists then test these seeds to check whether they do indeed display the required trait. On average less than 10%, if any, do. Once a seed has been found that displays the desired trait, things are still just as tricky.
You can’t just give these to farmers, as they’re still wild and may have one desirable trait, such as pest resistance, but no other desirable ones, such as the ability to produce a high yield. So then comes the lengthy process of incorporating the trait from the wild plants into a modern variety. This is the stage that Ogbonnaya and his team are at with their heat-resistant crops. And it takes years.
Even getting the crops to breed can be a nightmare – and for some species, impossible. Scientists use the plants’ own methods of fertilisation, but they do the dirty work themselves, usually using tweezers and forceps.
Then, it can take up to 10 generations to combine the useful traits from each parent in a way that creates the best crop possible. Basically, this involves breeding out all the ‘junk’ genes that are transferred from the wild relative along with the useful ones. When a new variety is finally created, it is shipped off around the world for local breeders to optimise it for their region and then distribute it to the farmers.
ICARDA has provided many such strains to Australia with great success, such as cereal crops that are resistant to fungal diseases called ‘rust’ and have saved the industry A$289 million a year. “Generally, it takes 10–12 years to develop one variety of crop,” says Imtiaz.
When food is a matter of life or death, this isn’t always an amount of time that can be afforded. Researchers at ICARDA are currently trying to speed up the process.
Street is starting at the beginning, and trying to ensure that the seeds provided by seed banks have a higher likelihood of containing the desired trait – saving both time and money.
The program, known as the Focussed Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS), could improve the likelihood of finding the trait farmers want from 10% to 80%.
“FIGS could revolutionise the way we approach gene banks,” says Street. The premise of FIGS is not to give researchers the most amount of genetic diversity, but to give them the specific trait they are looking for by examining the environment from which the seed was collected.
“For example, if we’re looking for a drought resistant crop, we’re going to look in low rainfall environments in which the seasonal rainfall is highly variable - this type of environment may have forced local populations to evolve towards physiological drought tolerance,” says Street.
But it gets much more specific than that. In the past, farmers needed crops that would withstand boron toxicity; a trait that FIGS correctly deduced would be found in marine origin soils along the Mediterranean cost.
FIGS has also been responsible for finding the first evidence of Russian wheat aphid (Syrian Biotype) and Sunn pest resistance in bread wheat pests that cost farmers millions of dollars a year in lost yield.
Of course, this isn’t the only place where the process can be sped up. Molecular biology has the potential to revolutionise the creation of new crop strains – and already has in some cases.
Genetic markers for traits are common in crops such as wheat and barley, and these allow researchers to confirm that what they’re looking for is in fact present in a plant – removing a lot of the guess work and cutting procedures that would usually take three months down to a week, says Imtiaz.
While the markers for wheat and barley are available to speed up the process, other crops, which are equally vital to food security, haven’t been able to keep up due to lack of investment. Chickpeas, for example – which Imtiaz works on – have only just begun to have their genetic markers identified.
Despite the tiny funds attributed to them, legumes are a crucial part of the future of our food systems, and a severely underrated one, according to Imtiaz – another ICARDA researcher who works closely with the GRDC and University of Western Australia to provide improved chickpea strains.
“People talk about food security, but wheat cannot sustain people on its own. If you plant just wheat, then productivity will go down and your soil will be continuously degraded,” says Imtiaz.
The other way to get improved crops to farmers faster is the one that no one readily wants to talk about: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). None of the crops produced by ICARDA are genetically modified, and yet there are contained labs set up on the site and introductory work being carried out, in case the process ever becomes more accepted.
The scientists are preparing for good reason – GMO technology could take the 12-year process of creating a new crop strain down to as little as a year or two, according to Imtiaz.Creating GMOs involves manipulating an organism’s genetic material by a method that doesn’t occur in nature – for example, by using bacteria to transfer an appropriate gene from one organism to another.
In agriculture, this often involves taking a gene and incorporating it into a modern crop. This can provide a number of beneficial traits without the need for the lengthy breeding process. And it won’t only shorten the procedure, it will open up avenues for a range of traits that can’t be incorporated into modern crops the traditional way.
This includes creating crop strains using genes not only from different plants, but also different organisms.
Examples include the CSIRO taking an insect-resistant gene from wheat and using it to create a strain of genetically modified cotton that has reduced cotton pesticide use by over 80% in Australia.
This ability would be a major benefit for chickpeas: out of the eight or so wild chickpea species, only two can be bred with domestic varieties. The other wild species could hide many desirable traits, says Imtiaz; but without GMO technology, we will not be able to harness their benefit.
About 134 million hectares of farmland worldwide are currently used to grow genetically modified crops – including cotton, rice and corn.
But in the public mind at least, there are still significant concerns about the technique’s safety, both to people and the environment.
After reviewing extensive research, the World Health Organisation currently does not find genetically modified food a threat to human health, but scientists accept the reality that people still worry about the long-term effects.
Imtiaz understands the concerns, but feels GMOs will only ever play a specific – yet crucial – role in agriculture. “GMO technology will never replace normal breeding – you’re only going to use GMO when you don’t have any other way of getting the trait.”
Street agrees, but thinks that eventually people will have to come to accept GM as a normal facet of modern agriculture. “I’m all for organic agriculture,” he stresses.
“But if we’re going to maintain the agricultural system we have, then we are going to have to bring yields to unprecedented levels using whatever tools are at our disposal or just say, ‘OK all these masses of people are going to die, we don’t have enough food and we don’t feel comfortable using certain technologies’.
We’ve got in our toolbox stuff that can integrate genes from, say, a bacterium, into crop plants, so that they’re not eaten by insects.
Should we do that? It’s OK for us to sit back and say it’s messing with nature, but what do we tell a farmer in Africa when half his crops get destroyed by an insect that’s moved down [due to] climate change?”
Ogbonnaya is of the same view: “If we can ensure that people can have nutritious food, then we should do it if it’s safe.”
Overall it seems the researchers agree that GM should only be used as a last resort – and that we are quickly approaching that juncture. “My primary drive is seeing people who have had drought just for one year go starving – thinking I can contribute to alleviating poverty by ensuring everyone has food on the table,” says Ogbonnaya.
It’s ironic that the salvation of millions from starvation in the decades ahead rests on wild plants previously ignored or tossed aside by humanity.
But knowing that they have endured frosty nights, days of 46˚C and batterings of sandy, hot winds – not just this year, but in the thousands of years since the Fertile Crescent’s desertification – suggests that they might just be able to help. Hopefully, we’ll find them in time.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/4207/full

MALNUTRITION: Pakistan 'crop shortage' warning

24 March 2011  By M Ilyas Khan BBC News, Islamabad

 The WFP played an important role distributing food in Pakistan after last year's floods 

Lowering wheat prices would create food shortages in Pakistan and encourage smuggling, officials say, responding to criticism from the UN.
On Wednesday the UN's food relief agency said the government set prices too high and malnutrition was rising.
But an official at Pakistan's food ministry told the BBC farmers would simply switch to more lucrative crops if wheat prices went down.
Devastating floods across Pakistan in 2010 damaged acres of arable land.
Although crop yields in 2011 are projected to be healthy, prices are too high for an impoverished population, the director of the UN's World Food Programme told journalists on the sidelines of humanitarian meetings in Geneva on Wednesday.
"The crop outlook is not bad but the food security situation remains difficult because prices remain so high," Wolfgang Herbinger said.

Smuggling risk
Malnutrition levels in the southern province of Sindh had reached 21% to 23%, according to the WFP.
It is nearly impossible to stop smuggling across the Afghan border, which is extremely porous”
"That is well above African standards. The emergency standard is 15%," Mr Herbinger said.
But lowering prices would do little to help the situation, an official at the food and agriculture ministry, who wished to remain unnamed, said.
He also warned that much of the crop would end up in the hands of smugglers. "Low farm-gate prices lead to lower acreage of wheat crop as farmers switch to other crops and it works as an incentive for smugglers seeking international prices in the neighbourhood. "It is nearly impossible to stop smuggling across the Afghan border, which is extremely porous," he said.
So if prices are lowered, the official said, the risk is that they would eventually rise to even higher than the level they are currently set at.
In the 1990s and between 2007 and 2009 there were severe wheat shortages across Pakistan, leading to extremely high prices.
Pakistani officials also say that malnutrition in Sindh province is not a new phenomenon and is unrelated to the food supply.
"Government statistics show that food consumption has not gone down despite the doubling of food prices since 2007-08," Kaisar Bengali, advisor to Sindh's chief minister said.
A lack of public hygiene facilities and safe drinking water were more important factors in child nutrition, he said.
"These are neglected areas, and there has been hardly any development in the public health sector here in decades," Mr Bengali said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12847052

POVERTY: Soaring Food Prices Hit Poor Countries, Spur Farmers

John Ydstie : February 27, 2011

 Seth Perlman/AP
A farmer harvests a corn crop near Monticello, Ill., last September. The price of wheat and corn jumped 70 percent in the second half of 2010.


Sharp increases in food prices helped spark the political upheaval gripping northern Africa and the Middle East. Bad weather in key growing regions was among a confluence of factors driving prices to record levels, a U.N. analyst says. But the price spikes are giving U.S. farmers an incentive to boost production.
Underlying the food inflation is a more than 70 percent increase in the price of wheat and corn in the second half of last year.
Elevated food prices are hitting hardest in poor countries such as Haiti, Bolivia and Mozambique, where people spend more than half their income on food.
"People who are already undernourished may have to forgo a meal. It does add to the number of hungry people," says Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist for the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.
He says the situation is alarming, but not yet a food crisis like the one the world faced three years ago.

Demand, Diversion And Drought
He says many factors have contributed to the upward pressure on food prices. There's demand for more varied diets in emerging economies such as China. And crops are being diverted for use in biofuels such as ethanol.
But the primary cause of the big spike in fuel prices is last year's bad weather: Russia's drought; rains in Pakistan, norther Europe and the U.S.; rains and floods in Australia; and dry conditions in Latin America.
"It looked like Mother Nature picked up the worst months to behave very bad," Abbassian says.
Russia's wheat-growing region was hit by the worst drought in 100 years. The huge wheat exporter halted shipments to foreign customers, including Egypt. Last week, Russian officials said they may extend the ban.
U.N. Food And Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index Hits Record Level

Annual, adjusted for inflation



Source: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization: Credit: NPR
The ruined harvest left global wheat stocks very low and pushed prices up sharply.

Investment Lags
A decade ago, that might not have happened because government crop subsidies in the U.S. and Europe produced huge stockpiles. But a change in world trade rules ended those subsidies and the stockpiles disappeared. It was hoped investment in Third World farmers would take up the slack. But Abbassian says governments, including the U.S., have invested just a fraction of what was pledged.
"In spite of the declarations and statements made, really the investment in agriculture is lagging behind," he says.
Smaller stockpiles have led to more volatile prices. That volatility has attracted speculators who profit from rapid price changes. But, so far, there's little evidence that speculators are significantly boosting overall prices.
Bad weather may have set the stage for this spike in grain prices, but Greg Page, president of the global food giant Cargill, says that while supplies are tight, prices have risen more than was necessary. He says that's partly because of instantaneous global communication.

A Hoarding Instinct
"People read stories about food prices going up and/or food being short and there's a natural hoarding instinct, I think, wired into all of us and people buy that extra 5-pound bag of flour or 2-liter bottle of vegetable oil," Page says.
OrganizationMultiply that by 100 million households, he says, and concern about a food shortage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Governments got into the hoarding act, too, he says.
"The Saudis have made a public announcement about their intention to double their strategic reserve," he says. "The Algerians have made a similar statement in the last several weeks."
Other nations are buying up grain stocks, too. All of this has pushed prices higher. Luckily, Page says, those high prices are a signal for farmers.

An Incentive To Boost Production
Greg Westland produces hard red spring wheat and soybeans on about 5,600 acres in Cando, N.D. The snow is still deep in North Dakota, but Westland is preparing for planting, spending days in his shop with his sons, prepping equipment. The high prices have convinced him to try to boost the number of bushels he produces per acre.
"We're adding more fertilizer, shooting for a 60-bushel hard red spring wheat crop up here and a 42-to-45-bushel soybean crop," Westland says.
Those yields would be about 20 percent above average. Cargill's Page says brisk fertilizer and seed sales indicate that farmers are responding.
"If nature gives them any collaboration at all I think we are clearly in a position to feed the world handsomely and actually to build some stocks this year based on the number of acres we would predict will be planted," he says.
As long as the weather cooperates. The U.N.'s Abbassian agrees. Both also acknowledge that climate change adds another level of uncertainty. Another wild card: the recent run up in the price of oil, which, if it persists, could boost already high food prices.

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/27/134069431/soaring-food-prices-hit-poor-countries-spur-farmers

MALNUTRITION: AFGHANISTAN: Government stockpiling wheat ahead of expected drought

  Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN 
Wheat is the most important food crop in Afghanistan

KABUL, 26 January 2011 (IRIN) - Up to 500,000 tons of wheat will be stockpiled in different parts of Afghanistan in anticipation of a mid-level drought later this year, with the aim of assisting vulnerable communities, stabilizing food prices and preventing shortages, officials told IRIN.
“We plan to store 500,000 tons of wheat - sufficient for 10 percent of the population for one year - in our strategic reserves,” said Majeed Qarar, a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL).
About 75,000 tons of wheat (surplus from 2010 domestic production procured by the government) is already in “strategic stockpiles” and 250,000 tons will be imported from India in line with a deal signed in 2010, he said. Afghanistan may have to look elsewhere, however, as India, which has its own food security concerns, could soon impose another wheat export ban.
The Afghanistan National Disasters Management Authority (ANDMA) said it was discussing drought mitigation plans with government and non-government bodies and UN agencies.
“We need to act pre-emptively and must be prepared to meet the humanitarian consequences of the drought,” Mohammad Daim Kakar, director of ANDMA, told IRIN, adding that a humanitarian appeal would be discussed with aid agencies next week.
A joint emergency appeal was launched by the Afghan government and UN agencies in response to the 2008 food price and drought crises. Millions of vulnerable people were assisted.

Little rain
Afghanistan has had little or no snow or rain this winter, which bodes ill for the country’s agriculture, the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) has warned.
Agriculture is the main income and livelihood source for over 60 percent of the population.
“Though major food shortages will be avoided if regional trade flows function normally, increased food insecurity and above-average food assistance needs are likely, especially during late 2011 and early 2012,” FEWS NET said in a 20 January food security alert.
Drought and conflict will worsen the humanitarian situation significantly
Below normal precipitation is forecast only in the northern parts of the country from February to April, according to the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
Traditionally, Afghan farmers use rain and glacier-melt runoff during the autumn to prepare land for winter wheat cultivation.
Over 60 percent of domestic cereals are produced in irrigated fields which are dependent on snow melt, springs and other local water sources. About 35 percent of the wheat, meanwhile, comes from rain-fed fields which need adequate rainfall from February onwards, MAIL said. Production is not focused on one particular region but dispersed across the country.
MAIL’s Majeed Qarar sounded a note of caution: “We don’t want to sound the alarm bell on drought prematurely because this could panic rain-fed farmers.”
Only 22 percent of the population have access to improved drinking water and a drought would create water shortages and exacerbate water and sanitation problems in the country, ANDMA warned.

Conflict makes things worse
Any deficit in cereals will be more evident in the country’s south and southeast where conflict-related humanitarian needs are already paramount, said Qarar. “In the north and northeast, we hope, cereal production will be good.”
In the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, which normally get 180-200mm of rain in January-February, no rainfall had been reported by 26 January, provincial agriculture officials said.
“Everyone anticipates more fighting here [Kandahar] in 2011,” said Sardar Mohammad Niazman, head of the Afghan Red Crescent office in Kandahar. “Drought and conflict will worsen the humanitarian situation significantly.”
Aid agencies such as the UN World Food Programme plan to distribute food aid to 7.8 million people in 2011, according to a Consolidated Appeals Process launched by the UN and NGOs in December 2010.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91736

POVERTY: Algeria buys wheat to avoid shortage, unrest

18 Jan 2011: (Editing by Jane Baird)
By Lamine Chikhi

ALGIERS, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Algeria's state grains agency has purchased around 1 million tonnes of wheat in the past two weeks to avoid shortages in case of unrest, a source from the ministry of agriculture told Reuters.
The OAIC's director, Nouredine Kahel, refused to make any comment, but a source at the ministry said that there are three main reasons behind Algeria's decision to buy big quantities in a short period of time.
"One is that we want to make sure that we do have enough wheat in case of unrest," the source, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
Several Algerian towns including the capital experienced days of rioting earlier this month, triggered by a sharp rise in food prices. Two people were killed and hundreds were injured during clashes between rioters and police, officials said.
To calm the situation, Algeria has decided to cut the cost of some foodstuffs and to increase by 18 percent the amount of soft wheat it supplies to the local market each month.
"This is the second reason behind Algeria's decision to buy big quantities of wheat," the source said.
The amount of soft wheat the OAIC agency supplies to processors will go up from 350,000 tonnes to 430,000 tonnes per month from Jan. 9 until Aug. 31, according to officials.
"The third reason is that we need to cover the period from March to June as the upcoming harvest will only be available in August," the source said.
Algeria, the world's fifth-biggest cereals importer has launched a plan in 2008 to reduce its dependency over imports.
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/corrected-algeria-buys-wheat-to-avoid-shortage-unrest-source

POVERTY: Food could cost more in 2011

Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN
Wheat could become even more expensive next year

17 November 2010 (IRIN) -
If wheat and maize production do not rise substantially in 2011, global food security could be uncertain for the next two years, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.
Wheat and maize prices have shot past their 2009 highs, with FAO adding that international food import bills could surpass one trillion US dollars in 2010. Food imports last topped the trillion dollar mark during the 2007/08 food price crisis.
The organization anticipates that world cereals stocks will shrink by seven percent, with barley declining 35 percent, maize by 12 percent and wheat by 10 percent.
Cereal stocks are not as low as they were in 2007/08, "but we are being slightly alarmist in our outlook to get production figures up next year," said Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains at FAO. "Stocks of yellow maize, which is used largely for animal feed, are getting to the low level they were in 2007/2008."
Six percent more maize will have to be produced in 2011 than in 2010, while wheat stocks need to rise by more than 3.5 percent to ensure the world has enough reserves to tide it over 2011, said the FAO Food Outlook, released on 17 November.
“We not only need to replenish our stocks in 2011 but we need to do better than that to ensure we have stocks to last us in 2012,” said Abbassian. FAO calculations have not taken into account the possibility of unfavourable weather conditions next year.
"We are assuming we will have normal growing conditions, but if we have heavy rains or drought in some of the cereal-producing countries we could be in trouble, or if we have great growing conditions production could go up by more than expected levels," Abbassian said.
Global wheat and barley stocks declined in 2010 as severe drought and fires slashed production in Russia and Ukraine two of the world's largest producers. The news drove up wheat prices by 45 percent and even 80 percent in the second half of 2010, with an export ban imposed by Russia adding impetus. Canada, another major wheat producer, was also hit by bad weather.
World wheat inventories are forecast to fall to 181 million tonnes, 10 percent below the 2010 level but still 25 percent above the critically low level of 2008, the Outlook said.
Maize stocks are already low as production slipped in the United States, the world's largest producer, while demand continued to grow. "With soya beans fetching good prices at the moment, many farmers in the US tended to devote more of their land to soya beans, which affected maize yields," said Abbassian.
The pressure on wheat prices affected maize, forcing prices up 50 percent from 2009 levels.
Fortunately, stocks of rice - the staple consumed by more than half the world's population - are adequate, but prices could come under pressure if other cereals become more expensive in 2011, according to FAO's Outlook.
Global cereal prices were not going to come down at any time soon, Abbassian commented, and "It is still very early to predict how much farmers will plant in 2011 - so still a lot of unknowns."
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=91109

MALNUTRITION: USA brings fungus-resistant wheat seed to Afghanistan

Fungus-resistant wheat seed will be delivered throughout the country for the fall 2011 planting season (file photo): Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN

KABUL, 4 November 2010 (IRIN) - The US Agriculture Department has shipped 150 tons of UG99 fungus-resistant wheat seed from Egypt to Afghanistan “to protect future crops, improve the livelihoods of thousands of Afghan farmers, and improve food security”, the US embassy said.
“This seed will be multiplied this year, and by next year [when it is distributed to farmers] it should be adequate to cover approximately 5 percent or more of wheat production area in Afghanistan,” Mireille L. Zieseniss, assistant press attaché at the US embassy in Kabul, told IRIN.
The expected multiplication, however, will be highly dependent upon favourable weather conditions. The country is prone to drought and floods among other natural disasters.
Millions of Afghans are chronically food insecure and the country struggles to produce enough cereals to meet domestic demand even in a good year, experts say.

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