Tinkering with agricultural markets is a dangerous business, especially when prices are skyrocketing and more and more people are going hungry. Hastily devised export bans, subsidy programs or regulation of commodities trading, however well intended, can make things worse. Many experts believe this to be the case with past food crises in the early 1970s and 2008, when governments took measures to seal off domestic markets at immense international cost.
This was one of the lessons from Wednesday’s roundtable discussion on the Hill “Price Shocks and Global Instability”, which was organized by ONE along with several other development and advocacy organizations.
“We must make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease”, explained Allan Jury, director of the UN World Food Program’s US Relations Office. Jury described the WFP’s five point strategy for coping with high food prices, which includes a strong focus on social safety nets to ensure that the poorest people have enough to eat, as well as the promotion of smallholder and women farmers to build resilience in the long term.
“Lessons have been learned from the 2008 crisis”, noted USAID’s Susan Bradley, who explained that the government’s Feed The Future program has a regional focus to improve transparency and grain transport in times of low supply.
Perhaps, then, we should be confident that donor countries will be able to cushion the most vulnerable from spiking prices this time around?
Not if they can’t afford to. Rising food prices means the cost of food assistance aid has shot up, with food aid costing the US government 20% more than before prices rose. The World Food Program’s food aid scheme is costing $200m more because of high prices.
At the same time, legislators in the US are threatening to cut food and agricultural aid by up to 40%, a double sucker punch to millions of empty stomachs around the world who would see their short term lifelines and their long term projects taken away.
This may sound like a moral issue, but it is also a self-interested one. Wendy Chamberlain, head of the Middle East Institute, discussed her experiences in Pakistan, where food security was a crucial way to prevent recruitment of desperate rural people by terrorist organizations. She pointed to a recent study which found that food aid provided by Americans after a 2005 earthquake led to higher levels of respect for Americans for years to come. An expert in attendance from the State Department confirmed the diplomatic importance of agricultural assistance, especially when it involves American companies as Feed the Future does through its Office of the Private Sector and Innovation.
As we draw ever closer to finding the right formula for short term humanitarian relief and long term agricultural investment, it would be wrong (and dangerous) to withdraw these programs from the world’s neediest people.
We’re kind of in love with this: researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a way to teach sustainable development education to those in Africa, despite literacy or language barriers. Using two minute animated clips that can be sent and downloaded via cell phone, these videos depict animated characters demonstrating how to do various agricultural tasks. The videos cover a range of topics, from teaching viewers in Haiti (in light of recent cholera spikes) how to make water safe for drinking and cooking to how a farmer in Nigeria can protect his crops from insects.
As University of Illinois professor and development member Barry Pittendrigh says, “This is a very different paradigm from some other current development projects, where US-based educators are flown to another part of the world, interact with people in the field for a few weeks to several months, and leave. From a financial perspective, this is a much cheaper way to do international development.” Cheaper, no language barriers involved, and widely accessible? Sounds good to us!
Big thanks to ONE friend Jaclyn Schiff for sharing this with us!
Food prices are high again. In December 2010, prices — according the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s measurement of a group of food commodities — soared higher than the peak of the 2008 food prices. While new figures have not been released, reports are saying that prices for staple foods in developing countries like rice and wheat are climbing and the suspicious absence of rioting is starting to reverse. Riots in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan might just be the start for a tumultuous year. But while these riots were not triggered by high food prices -– high food prices certainly only add to citizens’ gripes with their governments.
There are a number of factors at play: Adverse weather is driving grim grain projections in South America and the US, increasing demands for biofuels made from food crops, oil surpassing $100 a barrel for the first time since October 2008, expectations that Russia’s export bans will be extended beyond 2011 and that others are starting to hoard or panic-buy. All this suggests that prices will continue to climb. And while the G20 debates the role of financial speculation in influencing food prices more hungry people could take to the streets.
ONE is hosting ONE Can ONE Call events all over the country to raise awareness for hunger in both the US and Africa. Find an event near you on our website.
Here’s us with our neighbors
Last Thursday, our generous friends and neighbors came together for just a few moments to make a big dent in hunger. The ONE Can ONE Call event addressed hunger issues both domestically and abroad.
People cleared out their pantries and brought a lot more than just one can for the Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Over warm cider and pumpkin cookies, we chatted about the Global Food Security Initiative.
This year’s report looks at biofuels, cereals, oilseeds, sugar, meats, and dairy products from 2010 to 2019. Sounds delicious, right?
Well, for most people, it won’t be. Right now, there are more people that are hungry than ever before — 1.02 billion people. That’s one out of every 6 people on the planet. These people who battle extreme poverty every day also spend a large majority of their meager incomes on food. And most of these people are farmers who actually need to buy more food than they produce to survive.
So, when food prices rise –- as they did so dramatically in 2008 –- poor people run out of money to buy enough nutritious food to lead healthy lives. Or maybe they make different choices (like eating less or taking a child out of school) to help earn money for the family, or sell off assets such as cows and chickens -– which have deteriorating consequences for decades to come.
Every year, Global Citizen Year chooses a group of young Americans to spend nine months working as apprentices in rural communities all over the world. Mat Davis, a 2009-2010 fellow, talks about his experience working on a farm in Senegal.
Agriculture is a love of mine. I have been gardening on plots of land in inner city Indianapolis for five years.
It’s this love that led to me become a founding fellow for Global Citizen Year . The program helps young Americans gain a global perspective and develop skills to help address the global issues we’ll face in the future. Each fellow has an apprenticeship. Mine was agriculture.
I worked on a small scale farm for Pate Diop in Gorom, Senegal. I saw just how hard it is to grow enough food for one’s family and for the global market. And I saw just how hard these farmers have to work, overcoming technological disadvantages to do their work.
With Pate and his four sons, I watered 500 tomato plants, 300 pepper plants and whatever other plants he needed to make ends meet. The watering cans we used were made from a plastic gas container that was cut in half. A branch was nailed to either side. They weren’t pretty gardening cans from Sears, but they worked. We worked from 7 AM to 10 AM and then took a donkey-drawn cart back to Pate’s house to escape the hot sun. When we pulled up into the front yard, the women in Pate’s family would be waiting to carry the produce off the markets in huge baskets on the top of their heads. One small box would be kept for the family.
But I often felt frustrated at the markets. There were tables lined up and down the street with women selling vegetables and fish, but all the tables and all the food looked exactly the same. Working hard every day to see the people in my community left with only a small box of food and a market where they couldn’t compete was difficult for me. These were things I had heard and read about, but to gain the different perspectives and to actually live the story was powerful.
My experience on Pate’s farm helped me realize that even with a lot of hard work, farmers often fall short—they’re not able to grow enough food or it’s not at the right price to compete. So in the end, food security is really about giving farmers like Pate the capacity to cultivate more from his land and more for the community.
Famine in Niger affects 12 million – Expensive imports and aid remain out of reach for 12 million people in Niger – 80 percent of the population – which is facing the worst food crisis in years. Aid organizations say that the immediate obstacle preventing them from meeting urgent food needs is a donor shortfall of more than $100 million. (Afua Hirsch, The Guardian)
Horn of Africa once again polio-free – The Horn of Africa is again polio-free, with Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda having reported no cases for more than a year, said UNICEF. The victory is attributed to a series of multi-country immunization campaigns, along with greater technical support and strong political engagement. (Peter Mutai, Xinhua News)
Make Maternal Health Priority, African Leaders Told – Speaking at last week’s African Union summit, the Deputy U.N. Secretary-General maintained that women and children are the “engines” driving future economic growth on the continent, and that leaders must making meeting the 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline of improving child and maternal health a priority. (Abimbola Akosile, AllAfrica.com)
Kenyans to Vote on Controversial Constitution – Kenyans will vote on a controversial new constitution this week—the latest step by the nation’s leaders to bring political change to their country to quell tribal tensions. The U.S maintains a new constitution is central to this effort. (Sarah Childress, Wall Street Journal)
New focus on Sanitation in Burkina Faso – Burkina Faso has embarked on the construction of 55,000 latrines each year for the next five years to improve access to proper sanitation by more than 40 percent. The new initiative was spurred by findings that the current pace is insufficient to attain the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation in a context of rapid population growth. (Brahima Ouédraogo, IPS)
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Cuts to poverty-fighting programs won't balance the budget, but they will set back progress on Canada's development priorities and risk jeopardizing existing investments.
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