Food Crisis

Sitting in a Mexico City office, dressed in a pressed white shirt, Gerardo Sanchez seems a world away from his herds of goats and fields of beans.

But he’s no poster boy for the new world agricultural order, in which peasants are supposed to leave their unproductive farms and strive for middle-class prosperity while food production is left to agribusiness in the countries that farm most cheaply and efficiently.

Sanchez works for the National Campesino Federation, a lobbying group for small farmers that has been active lately in protests against the rising price of food, notably a doubling of the price of tortillas.

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave off food riots - sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The United States is promising millions in emergency food aid.

But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what’s needed is a radical rethink of how the world gets its food.

However, they’re deeply divided about which way to go.

Some would in effect reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing - take uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed.

Others argue that the problem is not that trade is too free, but that it should be freer. U.S. and European farm subsidies are bad enough, they say, and things will only worsen if the present crisis triggers more restrictions.

Those at the sharp end of rising prices feel like victims of a bait-and-switch maneuver - when they quit the land, they were promised food would get cheaper, and now it’s costlier. … more>>

Here.

An elderly woman reaches into the depths of her burqa for a small plastic bag, not even the size of a grocery sack.

She’ll take this much flour.

It requires only two scoops from a burlap-lined bushel for the merchant to fill his customer’s bag, weighing the precious commodity on battered scales. A fistful of Afghan dollars changes hands.

This purchase will be barely sufficient for a family’s bread-baking needs for one day.

Afghanistan, among the poorest nations in the world, is a country that lives by bread, the flat oblongs that emerge steaming from clay ovens. For many, bread rolled round a ragout of vegetables can be the entirety of a meal.

It is literally the staff of life.

But in some acutely impoverished regions, famished Afghans have been reduced to buying bread crust by the gram, softening the hardened bits in water, unable to afford flour at all.

The global food crisis has slammed Afghanistan hard, despite a good grain harvest last year. Wheat prices have risen by an average of 60 per cent over 2007, 300 per cent during a spike period in the early months of 2008: 46 Afghanis per kilo. That’s less than $1, but this is a country where half the population lives below the poverty line.

“I have eight children to feed,” complains Gulam Farouk, a 45-year-old civil servant who earns 3,000 Afghanis (about $63) a month, when he’s paid. “How can I keep them from going hungry?”

He was humping a five-kilo sack of flour at the Mandawi Bazaar, Kabul’s vast and higgledy-piggledy street market, where goods are sold from narrow open-front shops, rusty wheelbarrows and sagging dray carts.

Flour, beans, rice, pulses – they have become like saffron, relative to the ordinary Afghan’s income. … more>>

Here.

A growing international water crisis is forcing governments to rethink how they value and use and manage water, especially because economic development hinges on water availability.

Drinking water supplies, agriculture, energy production and generation, mining and industry all require large quantities of water.

In the future, these sectors will be competing for increasingly limited freshwater resources, making water supply availability a major economic driver in the 21st century.

By 2025 more than half the nations in the world will face freshwater stress or shortages and by 2050 as much as 75 percent of the world’s population could face freshwater scarcity. … more>>

Commentary by John M. Berry here.

Central American governments are handing out cash and fertilizers and buying up grains from farmers to prevent rising food prices from pushing millions into deeper hunger and poverty.

Guatemala, where one of every two children is already malnourished, is giving emergency money to thousands of women in the poorest areas to buy food for their families.

El Salvador is passing out hybrid corn seeds to increase production and Nicaragua is buying crops and selling them cheaply to consumers whose small incomes are stretched by rising prices.

Central America, torn by civil wars in the 1980s and still the poorest region of Latin America, hopes to avoid the type of violent protests over spiraling prices now plaguing nations from Cameroon to Bangladesh. … more>>

Britons are throwing away £10bn worth of food that could be eaten each year, £2bn more than estimates have previously suggested, a government-funded programme to cut waste reveals today.

The average household, ranging from a single older person to a group of students, is chucking out £420 of such food each year and the sum rises to £610 for the average family with children. … more>>

Nigeria on Wednesday announced it was suspending import duties and other taxes on rice while launching a raft of other measures to head off a food crisis in Africa’s most-populous nation.

The government said that it will not collect taxes on imported rice until at least after the end of October, seeking to curb rising prices on the staple food for many among Nigeria’s 140 million people. It also said it would seek to bolster domestic rice production while increasing its stock of emergency stores.

The government said it believed it could avert a food crisis in the country where most people live below the poverty line and struggle to feed their families.

“While other measures aimed at averting a domestic food crisis are under active consideration, the federal government remains fully confident that its immediate, medium and long term strategies for national food security will achieve the desired results and alleviate the impact of the global food crisis on Nigerians,” it said in a statement.

Like many poorer nations, Nigeria has struggled with the global phenomenon of spiraling prices for basic food items like grains, legumes and rice, which has seen a near doubling in its price in recent months. … more>>

Here.