Mario Lubetkin is FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. CREDIT: Max Valencia / FAO Lac

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Apr 2 2024 (IPS)

“I’m more optimistic than before” about the goal of ending hunger included in the 2030 agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean, said FAO regional representative Mario Lubetkin in an interview with IPS.

Lubetkin, who is also Assistant Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), warned that it is still difficult to achieve this goal, but expressed optimism about the awareness expressed by the leaders of 33 countries that participated in the organization’s 38th Regional Conference, held in the capital of Guyana.

At the meeting, which ended on Mar. 21, the governments agreed to emphasize the fight against hunger and improve agricultural management in the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The four FAO guidelines approved at the Georgetown conference are: more efficient, inclusive and sustainable production; ending hunger and achieving food security and nutrition; sustainable management of natural resources and adaptation to climate change; and reducing inequality and poverty and promoting resilience.

Solving the problem of hunger is a key element of international security and world peace, Lubetkin said during the interview at FAO’s regional headquarters in Santiago, Chile.

IPS: After the 38th Conference, are you more optimistic or pessimistic about achieving the zero hunger targets of the 2030 Agenda and in particular Sustainable Development Goal 2, zero hunger, for the region?

MARIO LUBETKIN: I still maintain that it is very difficult, but that is one part of the equation. The other part is whether I am optimistic about a state of increased awareness and action in Latin America and the Caribbean. Having heard what I heard and from that point of view I am more optimistic than before.

In how many electoral campaigns in the region last year and this year has the issue of no hunger and food security been addressed?… in many. And it was not an issue before.

Celac (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), the only structure for political dialogue among Latin American countries, approved at its last summit in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (Mar. 1-2) a new 2024-2030 food and nutrition security plan. This is the way the region is contributing, by rethinking their plans and focusing them in a forceful and clear manner.

Celac does not easily approve issues by acclamation or consensus, but now it has done so and this means that food security is above any conflict or political ideology. This is a source of optimism.

And the Group of 20 (large industrial and emerging countries), the world governance bloc chaired today by Brazil, will launch a major alliance against hunger and poverty.

These are very strong signals to address an issue that has been dragging on for too many years. Today there is a greater level of awareness.

IPS: What is the state of affairs in the region in the fight against hunger?

ML: There are about 43 million people suffering from hunger and more than 130 million have difficulty putting food on the table.

We are talking about a region that was the only one to reduce the number of hungry people by more than three million.

This is a sign that should not be underestimated, since it was reduced because there were policies that are beginning to yield concrete results.

IPS: But the problem is still pressing….

ML: Indeed, we cannot say that with this reduction we are reversing trends. What we can say is that there is a glimmer of hope. But if it continues for a second year, we could say that we are getting closer to seeing a real trend.

Until 2014 there was a net trend of hunger reduction. Then it changed worldwide, including Latin America.

We have seen a situation in which we are coming out of COVID with all the effects that it generated: a regression to a scenario of 20 to 25 percent hungry people. These are very severe numbers that we have gradually been improving, returning to the pre-COVID scenario.

IPS: Moving toward a solution to the problem of hunger requires a very broad social consensus.

ML: Today we cannot assert that all this is going to be tackled by one country, or by an international organization or the private sector. No one on their own is going to solve this problem.

During the Conference, economic, environmental, educational, health and social development components were discussed. No food security is possible without the participation of all these elements, all the actors and all the technicians.

When we talk about the transformation of agrifood systems, we are talking about sustainable land, quality seeds, lines of credit, especially for family farmers, water management, foreign trade, social development policies, education and health.

IPS: You mentioned a “glimmer of hope” in the fight against hunger due to the reduction in the number of hungry people by three million.

ML: I would call for a replication of the same policies applied by governments during the COVID pandemic, when there was no international cooperation or dialogue between countries, but rather local spending efforts to solve a fundamental issue.

At that time, we turned to the basics of survival and there were two main goals: not to catch COVID and to go to the supermarket and not find empty shelves.

There was investment during that period by countries to avoid disaster, and development policies because the machine did not stop. Many presidents understand that they must be at the forefront of food security because it is essential for a country’s socioeconomic stability.

IPS: This region is a major food producer, but overweight and obesity are on the rise. There are severe problems due to the consumption of junk food.

ML: In terms of adults, the obesity figure is over 24 percent. But we have more dramatic statistics. Obesity among children under five years of age exceeds 8.7 percent. This figure means an enormous passive burden for governments, for the rest of these children’s lives.

Another alarming fact is that the cost of eating quality food on a daily basis is the most expensive in the world, even though this is a food-producing region. Here it costs an average of 4.08 dollars a day, while the global average is 3.66 dollars and in Africa the cost is 3.78 dollars.

The cost of quality food is a problem that the region has to be capable of tackling. Education is another aspect.

Of the world’s total food production, 13 percent comes from this region. But far less than 20 percent is exported within Latin America, and that is a serious sign.

Latin America has the capacity to produce food for more than 1.3 billion people, with a population half that size, which means we have a huge margin.

IPS: In Brazil, public purchases are made from family farmers to supply school meals. Can initiatives like this help to solve the problem?

ML: Without a doubt. One of the key elements is for local experiences to expand beyond the borders of the country.

These are aspects of enormous sensitivity because we are talking about 70 or 80 percent of farmers. Large producers do not need us, but small and family farmers do. In addition ….this is where one of the great battles between development and poverty is played out.

IPS: Has the scenario been complicated by armed conflicts?

ML: I am not talking about war, but about wars, which, although they are far away from us, produce economic effects and effects on agricultural production that weigh heavily.

And we have a conflict that is really severe in Haiti, where almost 50 percent of the population of eight million have difficulties feeding themselves.

IPS: Ending the hunger crisis is key to international security and world peace.

ML: No doubt…. it’s very simple: war does not solve the issue of hunger, it can only aggravate it. Only in a scenario of peace can the issue of food security be addressed.

Where there is war, not the most high-profile wars but the ones that fly under the radar like in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia or Yemen, you can be sure that there will be no solution.

It can only happen in a scenario of peace, and if we are going to advance towards food security, it will be because we find ourselves in more positive scenarios, which is fundamental.

Excerpt:

A young Quechua mother, originally from Peru's southern Andes highlands, walks through the streets of Lima, carrying her young daughter in her lliclla (a colorful shawl made by native women in the Andes). A quarter of Peru's rural population under the age of five suffers from chronic malnutrition, clear evidence of inequality, which will have severe impacts on the rural child population. CREDIT: Wálter Hupiú / IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Mar 27 2024 (IPS)

Quechua farmer Felipa Noamesa, who lives in the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco, prepares a cream of fava bean soup for breakfast every morning with bread and vegetable soup with noodles. Her children are grown up, so her priority is that her five-year-old granddaughter does not suffer from anemia or malnutrition, two problems she frequently sees in her community.

“At my neighbors’ homes there are little children who don’t want to eat, who have swollen tummies, who have parasites, whose eyes look yellow and who fall asleep at school because they can’t stay awake,” the 44-year-old indigenous horticulturist told IPS during an interview at her plot of land in Paruro, the town where she lives with her husband, her daughter and her five-year-old granddaughter, Mayra, who she takes care of while her mother goes to school."Peru will have a couple of generations with much greater health problems, much lower productivity and many more restrictions to generate sustainable livelihoods in the broad sense." -- Carolina Trivelli

At their house they don’t eat beef, pork or lamb, but they do eat guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus), an Andean rodent of recognized nutritional value, which she raises in a small shed next to her house, close to their organic garden.

“For lunch I make broth, stew or roast guinea pig and combine it with fresh corn, potatoes, vegetables from my garden and cheese,” she said in her home in Paruro, the seat of the province of the same name, located more than 3,000 meters above sea level.

Peru, a country of 33 million people, faces a political and institutional crisis aggravated by the interim presidency of Dina Boluarte, who in December 2022 replaced Pedro Castillo, ousted and imprisoned for an attempt to seize control of all branches of power after less than 19 months in office.

The institutional crisis is compounded by an economic recession, the reduction of agricultural production due to climatic phenomena such as El Niño, and a poverty level that climbed to 30 percent in 2023, according to official provisional data.

Against this backdrop, the levels of anemia and malnutrition in children under five years of age are of concern.

According to official figures presented last year, chronic malnutrition affected 11.7 percent of the population, but with a greater impact in rural areas: 24 percent compared to seven percent in urban areas.

Other forms of malnutrition also present worrying indicators: 42 percent of the population aged six to 35 months has anemia, with a higher percentage in rural areas (51.5 percent) than in urban areas (39 percent). Meanwhile, nine percent of children under five years of age are overweight or obese.

In the Andes highlands department of Cuzco, with a population of 1.4 million divided among its 13 provinces, child malnutrition reaches 14 percent and anemia 51 percent. It is only surpassed by the central-western department of Huancavelica, which reports 29 percent child malnutrition. This situation reflects the harsh impact of inequality and poverty.

Felipa Noamesa, a 44-year-old Quechua farmer, stands in her vegetable garden in Paruro, a village in the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco. Malnutrition is a common problem in her community and her concern is to feed her young granddaughter a nutritional diet so that she will grow up strong and healthy. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

A price the whole country will pay

Carolina Trivelli, an economist and researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies, which has worked for more than 50 years in the country, said that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis, access to nutritious and healthy food for individuals and families has declined.

“Unfortunately chronic malnutrition stopped going down and has remained steady at around 11.7, 11.5, 12 percent over the last three to four years,” the former minister of Development and Social Inclusion during the government of Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) told IPS in an interview at her home in Lima.

She said this has to do with the specific situation of families, the public apparatus and structural conditions such as high food inflation that affects the ability of families in a context of recession to afford food in sufficient quantity and quality to combat malnutrition. In addition, there is anemia, overweight and obesity.

Trivelli said these three elements make up a set of malnutrition problems that particularly affect the most vulnerable groups, including children from the poorest socioeconomic sectors.

Economist and former Minister of Inclusion and Social Development of Peru, Carolina Trivelli, is interviewed in her home office in Lima. She warns about the cost that the country will pay over the next two generations due to the high level of chronic child malnutrition, a problem that she says should be a priority on the public agenda. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

When looking at the figures for consumption of food needed to address anemia and chronic child malnutrition, the difference between the consumption levels of the poorest 20 percent and the wealthiest 20 percent is enormous. So not only is there a problem of access to affordable food, but it is a major issue among the most vulnerable sectors.

“Peru is going to pay the cost of this, all Peruvians are going to pay it over the next two generations,” she warned.

The expert in agricultural economics said that “Peru will have a couple of generations with much greater health problems, much lower productivity and many more restrictions to generate sustainable livelihoods in the broad sense.”

Ernesto Fisher is mayor of San Salvador, a town in the province of Calca in the southern Peruvian Andes highlands region of Cuzco, which has one of the highest levels of chronic child malnutrition in the country. The municipal government has put a priority on attention to the problem, but he said they need the support of the central government to ensure drinking water and sanitation for the entire population. CREDIT: District of San Salvador

Focus on water and sanitation

Calca, another of Cuzco’s provinces, contains some of the municipalities with the most worrying rates of malnutrition and anemia. For example, in the municipality of San Salvador, population around 6,000, child anemia stands at 26 percent.

This fact is related to the quality of their housing, most of which is in a precarious condition, while they have low levels of access to services, especially those who live in the countryside.

“From the mayor’s office we are prioritizing food security projects for raising chickens and guinea pigs so that families can improve their nutritional intake, and we are also delivering iron syrup to health posts to be supplied to children and their mothers,” the mayor, Ernesto Fisher, told IPS from San Salvador.

In a telephone interview, Fisher, in office since 2022, said that to eradicate the problem it is necessary to address water and sanitation deficiencies in his town. To this end, the municipal government is designing projects aimed at guaranteeing water resources for irrigation of family crops, drinking water and sewage services connected to the public network.

“Without sanitation it is impossible to talk about fighting anemia and malnutrition. We will not be able to complete it in this administration, but we will leave the projects on track so that eight years from now all of San Salvador will have running water and sanitation,” he promised.

He called on the national authorities, especially President Boluarte, to prioritize projects that help close inequality gaps such as securing water for different uses. “The rest will come later,” the mayor said, stressing that this should be the top priority.

Boiled ears of fresh corn, pieces of cheese and beans, and roasted corn are common foods in the diet of rural Andean families in Peru. However, the decline in agricultural production due to droughts and other climatic events has reduced their access in quantity and quality. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

It’s not just about budget funds

Peru’s public policies reduced chronic child malnutrition between 2008 and 2016, as documented by the World Bank, which pointed to it as a successful experience.

However, the current situation shows that the problem is no longer seen as a priority. Trivelli said that it is not just a question of budget funds, but of combining multiple efforts simultaneously so that resources are spent effectively.

“We can give a family all the food and training they need, but if they don’t have sewage, a safe water source, and proper solid waste management, the problems of chronic malnutrition and anemia are not going to be reduced. If those children go to a school that does not have toilets, we will continue to reproduce the cycle,” she said.

Statistics show that it is the poorest people in rural areas and children who are directly affected by policies that do not place them at the center of their actions.

Trivelli argued that anemia and chronic malnutrition in children should be considered a priority problem of public interest addressed by a body at the highest political level, such as the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, in order to overcome the current scattered approach.

“We are not talking about a health issue only but about a crisis of food, development and poverty, and it needs to be part of the public agenda,” she insisted.

The large Citizen Action warehouse in downtown Rio de Janeiro is filled with food donated by people in solidarity for distribution to poor and hunger-stricken communities. There are 33.1 million Brazilians suffering from hunger, according to a survey by a network of researchers on the subject. CREDIT: Tânia Rêgo /Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 5 2022 (IPS)

A campaign against hunger, a problem that affects 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, seeks to mobilize society once again in search of urgent solutions, inspired by a mass movement that took off in the country in 1993.

“Now it’s more difficult, hunger has spread throughout the country, in cities where there was none, it has expanded,” said Rodrigo Afonso, executive director of Citizen Action, one of the social organizations spearheading the campaign.

“Besides, society is anesthetized with so many tragedies, exhausted after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, so many losses,” he lamented in an interview with IPS."Now it's more difficult, hunger has spread throughout the country, in cities where there was none, it has expanded." -- Rodrigo Afonso

And we cannot count on the current government, which in addition to deactivating policies that had been strengthening food security, adopted negative measures, the activist added, saying that for now they are looking towards civil society and companies.

“Brazil feeds one billion people in the world, we provide food security for one-sixth of the world’s population,” President Jair Bolsonaro exaggerated in his speech at the Summit of the Americas on Jun. 10 in Los Angeles, California.

But according to Brazilian agricultural researchers, who made a simple calculation based on the country’s growing grain production, Brazil’s food exports feed 800 million people.

If Brazil accounts for 10 percent of the world’s grain production, about 270 million tons this year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, then it feeds 10 percent of humanity.

The country is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, coffee and sugar, as well as the largest exporter of meat.

A green sea of soy is the landscape in vast areas of Brazil, especially in the midwest and southern regions of the country. They are held up as the “success” of Brazilian agriculture, which, according to President Jair Bolsonaro, feeds one billion people around the world. But paradoxically, 33.1 million Brazilians suffer from hunger. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Food for other countries, shortages at home

But the production boasted of by political leaders and large agricultural producers is basically destined for export and livestock feed. Brazilians consume only a small portion of the corn and an even smaller portion of the soybeans the country produces – most of it is exported or used for animal feed.

At the same time, Brazil is a net importer of wheat and beans, key products in the diet of the country’s inhabitants. And the production of rice, another staple, just barely meets domestic demand.

Bolsonaro and his far-right government, closely allied with export agriculture, seek to defend a sector that faces international criticism, due to its association with deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, harassment and mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the overuse of agrochemicals.

The hunger faced by 33.1 million Brazilians – 15.5 percent of the population – as reported by the non-governmental Brazilian Network for Research on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security (Penssan), further tarnishes the image of this country, a major food producer.

Penssan, headed by researchers from universities and other public institutions, but open to all interested parties, released its second National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Jun. 8.

The study based on data collected between November 2021 and April 2022 pointed to a 73 percent increase over the 19.1 million hungry people reported in the first edition, published in late 2020.

In other words, in just over a year of pandemic, the number of people suffering from severe food insecurity or frequent food deprivation increased by 14 million: from nine to 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, today estimated at 214 million.

The crisis especially affects people in the North and Northeast (the poorest regions), blacks, families headed by women and with children under 10 years of age, and rural and local populations that also suffer from water insecurity. Inequalities have intensified.

Wearing a T-shirt reading “Hunger, the greatest violence”, Herbert de Souza, Betinho (C), is honored as a symbol of the Brazilian fight against hunger. He led a massive campaign starting in 1993 and unleashed a process that allowed Brazil to be removed from the FAO hunger map in 2014. But the country returned to the map in 2018 and hunger worsened with the pandemic and the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2021. CREDIT: Facebook

Reviving the movement against hunger

To face this new emergency situation, Citizen Action called a National Meeting against Hunger, which brought together representatives of social movements, non-governmental organizations and food security councils that operate in the Brazilian states, from Jun. 20 to 23 in Rio de Janeiro.

The meeting approved a letter addressed to the public with a proposal for ten priority measures, ranging from an increase in the national minimum wage to a fair tax reform, the resumption of agrarian reform and the demarcation of indigenous lands, interrupted under the current government, and the restoration of food security policies also abolished under the Bolsonaro administration.

These demands will serve as the basis for the new anti-hunger campaign that will be officially launched in the coming weeks, Afonso announced.

The present outlook is due to the economic crisis Brazil has been suffering since 2015 and the pandemic, aggravated as “a product of recent government decisions, which dismantled food security policies and imposed new contrary measures,” the executive director of Citizen Action told IPS.

The Bolsonaro administration has not raised the minimum wage, for example, merely adjusting it each year to keep up with the official inflation rate. The current inflation rate of 11.73 percent accumulated in the 12 months up to May reduces the purchasing power of the minimum wage month by month.

The minimum wage, set at 1,212 reais (233 dollars) a month for this year, is no longer enough to cover the cost of the basic basket of food and hygiene products for a family of four in the southern city of São Paulo, which currently costs 1,226 reais, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.

Bolsonaro replaced the Bolsa Familia program with Auxilio Brasil, a stipend of 400 reais (77 dollars) – double the previous amount – to 18 million families, in an attempt to win votes among the poor, a sector in which he is highly unpopular according to polls for the October presidential elections.

But there are “almost three million very poor families” still excluded from the program, who are going hungry, Afonso stressed.

Citizen Action is the non-governmental organization heir to the massive movement unleashed in 1993 by sociologist Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho, which awakened the public to the extent of hunger in the country and mobilized the solidarity of millions of people in municipal, factory, school, neighborhood and community committees.

The campaign, called Citizen Action against Hunger and Poverty and for Life, triggered a process that culminated in the creation of a national food security system, governmental but with broad participation by society in councils at the national, state and municipal levels.

“We still have regional and local committees in all 26 Brazilian states” seeking to collect food donations and mobilize the population to prioritize the fight against hunger, Afonso said.

Many companies support the campaign that will also try to mobilize political leaders, delivering the letter approved at the Meeting against Hunger to all presidential candidates in the October elections, announced the activist, confident in a new awakening of society to the problem, despite the current adverse circumstances.

Poverty and hunger are on the rise in Lebanon. The World Food Programme estimates food prices have increased by 628 percent in two years. Credit: Mona Alami /IPS

By Mona Alami
Beirut, Nov 18 2021 (IPS)

On the streets of Beirut, Hadi Hassoun begs for a few pounds to feed his five children. He has little hope of a job, especially now that the economic crisis in Lebanon has destroyed wealth.

The country already significantly lagged with UN Sustainable Development Goals of poverty and inequality, but the situation has gone from bad to worse.

In the past year, poverty has tripled, and one in every four children in the country are skipping meals. The Lebanese pound (LP) has witnessed a devaluation exceeding 90%, dropping from 1,500 LP to the dollar to over 22,000 LP to the US dollar. At least half of the population is suffering in extreme ways because of this situation, experts say.

The streets of Beirut are an illustration of Lebanon’s dire situation. Hassoun sits begging on the streets of Hamra. “I have five kids, and my youngest daughter has a congenital heart problem,” he explains. “So, I do my best to raise some money every day to try catering to their basic needs.”

In Beirut, the UNICEF office reported that three out of 10 children go to bed hungry or skip meals.

A few meters away, Khalid, using a pseudonym, is a garbage collector for one of Beirut’s main waste management companies. The man, in his sixties, hails from Wadi Khaled, a border town over 150 km away from Beirut.

“I do not have the means to visit them anymore because of rising fuel prices, so I send them money every two weeks, which allows them to eat basic staples such as rice and lentils,” he says. Khalid makes 60,000 LP per day, which amounts to less than $2.5 a day.

The World Food Programme (WFP) estimated that food prices have gone up by 628 percent in just two years.

According to Nassib Ghobril, chief economist for Lebanese Byblos Bank, the CPI rose by 144% in September 2021 compared with the same month in 2020, while it registered its 15th consecutive triple-digit increase since July 2020.

“The cumulative surge in inflation is due, in part, to the inability of authorities to monitor and contain retail prices, as well as to the deterioration of the Lebanese pound’s exchange rate on the parallel market, which has encouraged opportunistic wholesalers and retailers to raise the prices of consumer goods disproportionately,” Ghobril says.

He adds that the smuggling of subsidised imported goods has resulted in shortages of these products locally, which also contributed to price increases.

“Further, the emergence of an active black market for gasoline during the summer has put upward pressure on prices and inflation.”

The prices of fresh or frozen cattle meat in Lebanon jumped by 118.6% in the period, constituting the highest increase in the price of this item in the region, reported Ghobril.

In parallel, the price of bread and other manufactured articles sold went up by 32.8%, representing the third-highest increase in bread prices among MENA countries.

The impact is devastating.

“My family can barely afford bread,” says Khalid.

Lebanon falls short on the UN SDGs at every level, particularly when it comes to poverty and inequality.

Economist Kamal Hamal Hamdan explains that while there are no credible governmental statistics, at least 55% of the Lebanese population live under the poverty line.

“However, estimates actually point to 75% of the Lebanese population falling under the poverty line. This number goes up to 85% in extremely poor areas such as North Lebanon or the Baalback Hermel area,” points out Adib Nehme, a Lebanese development and poverty consultant.

However, both Ghobril and Hamadan believe these statistics may not consider the various sources of income of Lebanese in the form of aid and remittances. Lebanon received last year $ 6.5 billion in remittances from Lebanese expatriates.

Before the crisis, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owned almost 70 percent of total wealth. Nehme underlines that around 73% of the Lebanese population earned 2.4 million LP per month before the crisis.

“If these people managed to keep their jobs despite Lebanon’s meltdown, this means that around three-quarters of the population earns around $120,” says Nehme.

Additionally, Hamdan underlines that around 60% of wage earners in the pre-crisis era contributed to 25% of the Lebanese GDP, which has worsened.

The financial crisis plaguing Lebanon has created further inequality. The poor and the middle class have been the hit hardest. When they have the luxury have bank accounts, their funds are frozen, and when withdrawn, the funds earn a lower than the black-market rate.

The richest and politically connected have been able to transfer their funds despite the unofficial capital control imposed by Lebanese banks.

“One has to keep in mind that around 963 depositors own $23billion, that is not considering these people’s wealth in land and investments. There is growing polarisation because of concentration of wealth, with Lebanon’s economic collapse,” says Nehme.

Hamdan and Nehme believe this is leading to the disintegration of the country’s social and economic fabric.

“This could lead to growing social pressure and transient violence across the country,” says Hamdan.

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Julio Berdegué, FAO regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, in his office in Santiago. Credit: Maximiliano Valencia/FAO

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, May 24 2017 (IPS)

The fight against hunger has been “remarkably successful” in Latin America and the Caribbean, but “it is a crime” that 35 million people still go to bed hungry every day, FAO regional representative Julio Berdegué told IPS.

Berdegué, who is also assistant director-general of FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation), with decades of experience in matters related to rural development, said during his first interview as the new regional representative that the biggest challenge in Latin America and the Caribbean is inequality, which “is present in every action and contributes to many other problems.”

In the FAO regional office in Santiago, Berdegué, from Mexico, discussed with IPS issues such as obesity, “in which we are losing the fight,” the weakness of rural institutions, which facilitates corruption, or the weakness of the social fabric, which drug trafficking mafias depend on, as well as the need to address the question of water scarcity which is here to stay due to climate change, and where the key is the transformation of agriculture, which uses 70 per cent of all water consumed.

IPS: What do you consider are the greatest debts of the region in the agri-food sector?

JULIO BERDEGUÉ: We unfortunately still have very high levels of rural poverty. Nearly 50 per cent of the rural population is still living in poverty conditions and almost 30 per cent in extreme poverty. There are 58 million rural poor and 35 million living in conditions of indigence, who are not even able to feed themselves adequately.

IPS: This is happening in the region that has been the most successful in reducing poverty and hunger in this century…

JB: We have a problem with malnutrition and hunger, which even though they have been notably reduced, still stand at 5.5 per cent, which in human terms means that 35 million Latin Americans are still going to bed hungry every day, and six million children are chronically undernourished… Which is a crime. And of these, 700,000 children suffer from acute and chronic undernutrition… that is terrible.

IPS: In that context, which will be the priorities of your administration?

JB: The main thrust has been continuity, and I want to adhere to that. FAO’s mission and strategic objectives are clearly defined in a medium-term work plan discussed and approved in May in Rome (at FAO’s global headquarters).

The first objective has to do with hunger…undernourishment and malnutrition will continue to have a central role in the agenda. The second has to do with greater sustainability of agriculture, contributing to global food security, in a sustainable manner.

The issues of rural poverty, where unfortunately family agriculture is included, beyond what people might think, are not yet lost, but we still have a long way to go. Also the importance of food systems, which have experienced in the past 25 to 30 years a radical shift in their depth and speed, and the importance of resilience in the face of climate change.

IPS: And what are the regional assets available to carry out these tasks?

JB: We must not lose sight of the fact that Latin America is a great contributor to global food security. What our region does in this matter is very important, and we must take advantage of this strength.

This is also a region with enormous biodiversity. In terms of biodiversity the region is a player of global importance and whatever we do well or badly affects each person on this planet.

IPS: Has there been progress in the political and social spheres?

JB: The question of peace in the region is another asset. What has happened in Colombia (with the peace agreements that came into force in late 2016) is exciting for all of us, and is of utmost importance. In the last 20 years there has also been heavy spending in rural areas, on roads, electrification, telecommunications, and access to basic services, education and health. The educational levels of our rural people under 35 are far higher than that of their parents. These are assets that we need to mobilise.

IPS: And what are the weaknesses you perceive in these same fields?
JB: In rural areas, government institutions are very weak, in most countries in the region… The exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand… and they are weak because they are outdated, because there is much corruption, patronage, use of public budgets for particular interests, and that weakens the government and public action for the benefit of society as a whole. It makes our job difficult.

IPS: Apart from that difficulty, what other challenges does the region face?

JB: The rural social fabric has been weakening in some countries. The penetration of drug trafficking, of violence, which often goes hand in hand with corruption, makes life very hard for the inhabitants of those rural areas and makes it very difficult to bring political solutions that would increase their opportunities and well-being. The situation in some Central American countries is extremely concerning. In my own country, Mexico, the situation worries all Mexicans. The levels of violence in Venezuela… There are countries where the weakening of the social fabric is a warning sign.

IPS: Latin Americans are facing a new and growing problem, obesity, without yet having solved that of chronic malnutrition…

JB: Malnutrition is a crime. The fact that more than half of the rural children in Guatemala suffer from chronic undernutrition is unacceptable in the 21st century, but obesity is killing us. Not long ago, Mexico’s minister of health, Dr. José Navarro, who until recently was the provost of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), reminded us that obesity kills more people than organised crime in Mexico. Obesity is definitely killing us.

IPS: Do malnutrition and obesity have anything in common?

JB: First, let me say in what they differ. We have greatly reduced undernutrition. In this, Latin America has been remarkably successful, even at a global level. We are the only region that has met its Millennium Development Goals. But in terms of obesity we are losing the fight badly. Every day there are more overweight and obese people.

What they have in common, from FAO’s perspective, is a radical change in Latin America’s food systems. The world in which we had local markets and people ate locally produced food, where many people went home to eat, has disappeared forever.

Today our food systems are globalised, the bulk of the distribution of food products is through supermarket chains, most of what we eat are ultra-processed foods. Even our farmers eat mostly purchased food: processed and ultra-processed.

IPS: But this is a global phenomenon, as you say, not only regional…

JB: The point is not the transformation of the agri-food systems. That transformation can also be observed in Norway, Canada or New Zealand. They have the same patterns of urbanisation, of eating outside the home, purchasing in supermarkets, ultra-processed foods, etc. The difference is that in those places there are public policies. Ours is a transformation that responded to market forces without public policies. The market achieves important things… today food products are much cheaper, but with enormous consequences, one being obesity and the erosion of public health in all aspects that have to do with what and how we eat.

IPS: So, what public policies are needed in the region to tackle obesity?

JB: What has to be done is to ‘redirect’ these transformation processes of the food systems, bearing in mind that we have public objectives. Redirecting means setting certain limits. For example, what is being done in Chile and to some extent in Mexico with sugary beverages, and labeling. There are healthy and unhealthy foods, and consumers have to know this.

Redirecting also means putting greater emphasis on public education with regard to healthy eating. It means that if there are places with less access to a more varied diet, to fresh fruit and vegetables, we cannot leave it to be solved by the market.

IPS: Another problem that is creating conflicts is water, its scarcity and its uses. What should be done from the agri-food sector?

JB: We have a terrible problem here, which is that agriculture is consuming 70 per cent of our planet’s fresh water. This is not sustainable and has no future. If I were president of a given country in 30 or 50 years, and they told me: ‘To produce potatoes you are using 70 per cent of the water and people have no water in the cities because of climate change,’ as president I would say: ‘well, we will import potatoes, and stop growing them.’

Between giving water to the people or producing potatoes, lettuce or asparagus… we are going to lose that fight. Our farmers fight, they organise to get more water, and it is good that they do that. We make dams and reservoirs, that’s great. But we have to start thinking how we can practice agriculture using less water, how we can produce the same amount of food without using 70 per cent of the water, and using half of that instead. We cannot talk about ‘zero water’ agriculture, but it should be much less than 70 per cent, and this is something that we are not thinking about.

We are used to using water almost without restrictions, and climate change is putting an end to that. We will not be able to go rapidly from 70 to 35 per cent water use in agriculture, but we better start now because otherwise climate change will win the race.

Excerpt:

Even luxury homes in the Zimbabwean capital Harare were not spared by the raging floods of early 2017, perpetuating hunger in the Southern African nation after El Nino ravaged crops nationwide. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 3 2017 (IPS)

Dairai Churu, 53, sits with his chin cupped in his palms next to mounds of rubble from his destroyed makeshift home in the Caledonia informal settlement approximately 30 kilometers east of Harare, thanks to the floods that have inundated Zimbabwe since the end of last year.

Churu’s tragedy seems unending. From 2015 to mid-2016, the El Nino-induced drought also hit him hard, rendering his entire family hungry.“We are homeless, we are hungry. I don’t know what else to say.” -- farmer Dairai Churu

“I farm here. I have always planted maize here. All my crops in 2015 were wiped out by the El Nino heat and this year came the floods, which also suffocated all my maize and it means another drought for me and my family,” Churu told IPS.

Churu, his wife and four children now share a plastic tent which they erected after their makeshift three-room home was destroyed by the floods in February this year.

“We are homeless, we are hungry. I don’t know what else to say,” Churu said.

Zimbabwe has not been spared the severe droughts and floods triggered by one of the strongest El Niño weather events ever recorded in the country’s history, which have left nearly 100 million people in Southern Africa, Asia and Latin America facing food and water shortages and vulnerable to diseases, including the Zika virus, according to UN bodies and international aid agencies.

With drought amidst the floods across many parts of this Southern African nation, the Poverty Reduction Forum Trust (PRFT) has been on record in the media here saying most Zimbabwean urban residents are relying on urban agriculture for sustenance owing to poverty.

PRFT is a civil society organisation that brings together non-governmental organisations, government, the private sector and academics here in Zimbabwe to discuss poverty issues and advocate for pro-poor policies.

Even government has been jittery as floods rocked the entire nation.

“Not all people are going to harvest enough this year. The floods have come with their own effects, drowning crops that many had planted and anticipated bumper harvests. Some greater part of the population here will certainly need food aid as they already face hunger,” a senior government official in Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Ministry told IPS on condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

For the mounting floods here, experts have also piled the blame on the after-effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

“El Niño conditions, which are a result of a natural warming of Pacific Ocean waters, lead to droughts, floods and more frequent cyclones across the world every few years. This year’s floods, which are a direct effect of the El Nino weather, are the worst in 35 years and are now even worsening and bearing impacts on farming, health and livelihoods in developing countries like Zimbabwe,” Eldred Nhemachema, a meteorological expert based in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, told IPS.

Consequently, this Southern African nation this year declared a national emergency, as harvests here face devastation from the floods resulting in soaring food prices countrywide, according to the UN World Food Programme.

The UN-WFP has also been on record reporting that Zimbabwe’s staple maize crop of 742,000 tonnes is down 53 percent from 2014-15, according to data from the Southern African Development Community.

The floods have prompted Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate to recommend that a state of disaster be declared in the country’s southern provinces, where one person was killed by the floods while hundreds were marooned by raging rivers that swept away homes and animals.

For instance, this year’s floods in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo Province left 300 pupils marooned at Lundi High School, leaving mostly girls stranded after the Runde River burst its banks and flooded dormitories. About 100 homesteads were also hit by the floods in the country’s Chivi, Bulilima and Mberengwa districts, according to the country’s Civil Protection Unit.

Based on this year’s February update from the country’s Department of Civil Protection, at least 117 people died since the beginning of the rainy season in October last year.

And for many Zimbabweans like Churu, who were earlier hit by the El Nino-induced drought, it is now double trouble.

“We already have no crops surviving thanks to the floods, yet we have had our crops destroyed by El Nino the previous year, and so suffering continues for us, with drought in the midst of floods. It hurts,” Churu said.

Excerpt:

Dr. Howarth Bouis: 2016 World Food Prize Laureate

By Howarth Bouis
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 21 2016 (IPS)

This year’s World Food Prize pays tribute to biofortification, an intervention that strengthens efforts to address one of the world’s most insidious and pervasive public health challenges—hidden hunger. That is good news for the majority of the two billion people globally who suffer from hidden hunger, and likewise for those fighting to end the epidemic.

Hidden hunger is the lack of essential vitamins and minerals (micronutrients) necessary for a healthy and productive life. According to the World Health Organization, zinc, iron and vitamin A are among the micronutrients most lacking in diets globally. The deficiency in these particular micronutrients can lead to blindness, stunting, mental retardation, learning disabilities, low work capacity, and even premature death.

Women and young children are hardest hit. More than half of women and three-quarters of children aged under five in India, for example, are estimated to be iron deficient. The burden of hidden hunger extends to economies. India alone loses over $12 billion in GDP annually to vitamin and mineral deficiencies.[1]

The majority of populations most affected by hidden hunger reside in the developing world where regular access to important and effective interventions such as supplementation and fortification is constrained by cost and infrastructure challenges.

More than half of women and three-quarters of children aged under five in India, for example, are estimated to be iron deficient. The burden of hidden hunger extends to economies. India alone loses over $12 billion in GDP annually to vitamin and mineral deficiencies
Those populations are also, unfortunately, unable to diversify their daily diet and, therefore, their micronutrient intake since they rely largely on macronutrient- and/or energy-rich but micronutrient-poor staple food crops—rice, maize, cassava, beans, etc.—for sustenance. In India, for instance, only about one in 10 children regularly consume iron-rich food, while the proportion of children under two years of age who regularly consume vitamin A-rich foods is less than half.[2]

It is difficult to imagine a reversal in the global incidence and impact of hidden hunger without innovative new approaches to complement conventional nutrition interventions. Biofortification is not the silver bullet, but it can significantly expand the reach of nutrition to populations in need. Its underlying premise is that since millions of people eat staple food crops daily, improving the nutritional quality of these crops will lead to better nutritional and health outcomes.

By breeding and disseminating staple food crops rich in vitamins and minerals, biofortification can substantially increase the intake of micronutrients among households growing and consuming these improved crops.

Biofortification has distinct advantages.  It is sustainable; farmers and consumers who adopt biofortified crops can grow and eat these crops over and over, benefitting from the extra vitamins and minerals for free. It is a food based approach that lets the plants do some of the work. Biofortification is also cost effective. After the initial outlay of funds, the recurrent costs are minimal, and each dollar invested reaps $17 dollars’ worth of benefits.[3]

More importantly, biofortification is effective. Recently published studies show that crops biofortified with iron, such as pearl millet in India[4] and beans in Rwanda, [5] can reverse iron deficiency. Sweet potato biofortified with vitamin A reduced the incidence and duration of diarrhea among children in Mozambique.[6] The evidence on the nutritional and health impact of biofortified crops continues to grow as the crops gain momentum around the world.

To date, biofortified crops have been released in 30 countries, including India, and are under testing in an additional 25. HarvestPlus and its partners are developing and delivering these crops as public goods. At least four million households in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have already been reached with these nutritious crops. Scaling up delivery to reach a billion people with biofortified foods by 2030 is a key objective of HarvestPlus.

By shining the spotlight on biofortification, the World Food Prize has brought greater visibility and momentum to the strategy, and it can be the springboard for its scale up and impact globally. India, a country that is no stranger to agricultural innovations, will also play a major role in scaling up biofortification.

The country has already adopted several biofortified crops such as iron pearl millet, zinc rice, and zinc wheat, with more on the way. In 2018 New Delhi will host the Third Global Conference on Biofortification, which will explore strategies and partnerships to broaden delivery and adoption of the nutritious foods. This is a pivotal moment for biofortification and the millions of households around the world who stand to benefit from its success.

[1] World Bank

[2] UNICEF

[3] The Copenhagen Consensus

[4] The Journal of Nutrition

[5] The Journal of Nutrition

[6] World Development

Excerpt:

PAP officials attend the workshop for members of the Pan African Parliament and FAO to advance the Food and Nutrition Security Agenda. Credit: Desmond Latham/IPS

By Desmond Latham
CAPE TOWN, Aug 2 2016 (IPS)

As over 20 million sub-Saharan Africans face a shortage of food because of drought and development issues, representatives of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Pan African Parliament (PAP) met in Johannesburg to forge a new parliamentary alliance focusing on food and nutritional security.

Monday’s meeting here came after years of planning that began on the sidelines of the Second International Conference on Nutrition organised by the FAO in late 2014.“The first port of call when there are food security issues is normally the parliament. We should be at the forefront of moving towards what is known as Zero Hunger." -- Dr. Bernadette Lahai

Speaking at the end of the day-long workshop held at the offices of the PAP, its fourth vice president was upbeat about the programme and what she called the “positive energy” shown by attendees.

“We have about 53 countries here in the PAP and the alliance is going to be big,” said Dr. Bernadette Lahai. “At a continental level, once we have launched the alliance formally, we’ll encourage regional parliaments so the whole of Africa will really come together.”

“This will be a very big voice,” she said on the sidelines of the workshop.

FAO Rome Special Co-ordinator for parliamentary alliances, Caroline Rodrigues Birkett, said her role was to ensure that parliamentarians take up food security as a central theme.

“The reason why we’re doing this is because based on the evidence that we have in the FAO, is that once you have the laws and policies on food and nutrition security in place there is a positive correlation with the improvement of the indicators of both food and security of nutrition,” she told IPS.

“Last year we facilitated the attendance of seven African parliamentarians to a Latin American and Caribbean meeting in Lima, and these seven requested us to have an interaction with parliamentarians of Africa,” she said.

A small team of officials representing Latin America and the Caribbean had traveled to Johannesburg to provide some details of their own experience working alongside the FAO in an alliance which had focused on providing food security to the hungry in South America and the island nations of the Caribbean.

These included Maria Augusta Calle of Ecuador, who told the 20-odd PAP representatives that in her experience working alongside officials from the FAO had helped eradicate hunger in much of the region.

From left to right: FAO Rome Special Co-ordinator for parliamentary alliances, Caroline Rodrigues Birkett, Maria Augusta Calle, and PAP Vice-President Dr Bernadette Lahai. Credit: Desmond Latham/IPS

Caribbean representative Caesar Saboto of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was also forthright about the opportunities that existed in the developing world to deal with hunger alleviation.

“It’s the first time that I’m traveling to Africa,” he said, “and it’s not for a vacation. It’s for a very important reason. I do not want to go back to the Caribbean and I’m certain that Maria Augusta Calle does not want to go back only to say that we came to give a speech.”

Saboto delivered a short presentation where he outlined how a similar programme to the foundation envisaged by those attending the workshop had drastically reduced hunger in his country.

“In 1995, 20 percent of my country of 110,000 people were undernourished,” he said. “Over 22,000 were food vulnerable. But do you know what? Working with communities and within governments we managed to drive down that number to 5,000 in 2012 or 4.9 percent of the population. And I’m pleased to announce here for the first time, that in 2016 we are looking at a number of 3,500 or 3.2 percent,” he said to applause from the delegates.

PAP members present included representatives of sectors such as agriculture, gender, transport and justice as well as health. Questions from the floor included how well a small island nation’s processes could be used in addressing the needs of vastly larger regions in Africa.

“Any number can be divided,” said Saboto. “First you have to start off with the political will, both government and opposition must buy into the idea. If you have 20 million people you could divide them into workable groups and assign structures for management accountability and transparency,” he said.

African delegates queried the processes which the Latin American nations have used to set up structures in particular.  Dr. Lahai wanted the Latin American delegates to assist the African parliament in planning the foundation.

“Food security is not only a political issue but a developmental issue,” she told IPS in an interview.

“The first port of call when there are food security issues is normally the parliament. We should be at the forefront of moving towards what is known as Zero Hunger,” she said.

But major challenges remain. After a meeting in October last year, the FAO had contracted the PAP with a view to targeting hunger in a new alliance. The PAP is a loose grouping of African nations and members pointed out that they were unable to get nation states to support an initiative without a high-level buy in of their political leadership.

Dr. Lahai was adamant that the workshop should begin addressing issues of structure. She stressed that co-ordination between the PAP, various countries and other groupings such as Ecowas (the Economic Community of West African States) and SADC (Southern African Development Community) should be considered.

“We need a proper framework,” she said. “It’s important to engage our leaderships in this process. With that in mind, I would suggest that we learn a great deal from our visitors who’ve had a positive experience in tackling nutrition issues in Latin America.”

In an earlier presentation, FAO representative for South Africa Lewis Hove had warned that a lack of access to food and nutrition had created a situation where children whose growth had been stunted by this reality actually were in the most danger of becoming obese later in life. The seeming contradiction was borne out by statistics presented to the group showing low and middle income countries could see their benefit cost ratio climb to 16-1.

Africa’s Nutritional Scorecard published by NEPAD in late 2015 shows that around 58 million children in sub-Saharan regions under the age of five are too short for their age. A further 163 million women and children are anaemic because of a lack of nutrition.

The day ended with an appeal for further training and facilitation to be enabled by the FAO and PAP leadership. With that in mind, the upcoming meeting of Latin American and Caribbean states in Mexico was set as an initial deadline to begin the process of creating a new secretariat. It was hoped that this would prompt those involved in the PAP to push the process forward and it was agreed that a new Secretariat would be instituted to be headquartered at the PAP in South Africa.

Dr Lahai said delegates would now prepare a technical report which would then be signed off at the next round of the PAP set for Egypt later this year.

Despite being one of the biggest grain producers of the world, India lags behind on food security with nearly 25 percent of its population going to bed hungry. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jul 28 2016 (IPS)

In a fraught global economic environment, exacerbated by climate change and shrinking resources, ensuring food and nutrition security is a daunting challenge for many nations. India, Asia’s third largest economy and the world’s second most populous nation after China with 1.3 billion people, is no exception.

The World Health Organization defines food security as a situation when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preference for an active and healthy life. The lack of a balanced diet minus essential nutrients results in chronic malnutrition.The global food security challenge is unambiguous: by 2050, the world must feed nine billion people.

According to the Global Hunger Index 2014, India ranks 55 out of the world’s 120 hungriest countries even behind some of its smaller South Asian counterparts like Nepal (rank 44) and Sri Lanka (39).

Despite its self-sufficiency in food availability, and being one of the world’s largest grain producers, about 25 per cent of Indians go to bed without food. Describing malnutrition as India’s silent emergency, a World Bank report says that the rate of malnutrition cases among Indian children is almost five times more than in China, and twice that in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So what are the reasons for India not being able to rise to the challenge of feeding its poor with its own plentiful resources? Experts ascribe many reasons for this deficit. They say the concept of food security is a complex and multi-dimensional one which becomes even more complicated in the context of large and diverse country like India with its overwhelming population and pervasive poverty and malnutrition.

According to Shaleen Jain of Hidayatullah National Law University in India, food security has three broad dimensions — food availability, which encompasses total food production, including imports and buffer stocks maintained in government granaries. Food accessibility- food’s availability or accessibility to each and every person. And thirdly, food affordability- an individual’s capacity to purchase proper, safe, healthy and nutritious food to meet his dietary needs.

Pawan Ahuja, former Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, says India’s problems result mostly from a deeply flawed public distribution system than anything else. “Despite abundant production of grains and vegetables, distribution of food through a corruption-ridden public distribution system prevents the benefits from reaching the poor,” says Ahuja.

There are other challenges which India faces in attaining food security, adds the expert. “Natural calamities like excessive rainfall, accessibility of water for irrigation purpose, drought and soil erosion. Further, lack of improvement in agriculture facilities as well as population explosion have only made matters worse.”

India’s agriculture sectors have to bolster productivity by adopting efficient business models and forging public-private partnerships. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

To grapple with its food security problem, India operates one of the largest food safety nets in the world — the National Food Security Act 2013. India’s Department of Food and Public Distribution, in collaboration with World Food Program, is implementing this scheme which provides a whopping 800 million people (67 percent of the country’s population or 10 percent of the world’s) with subsidised monthly household rations each year. Yet the results of the program have been largely a hit and miss affair, with experts blaming the country’s entrenched corruption in the distribution chain for its inefficacy.

The global food security challenge is unambiguous: by 2050, the world must feed nine billion people. To feed those hungry mouths, the demand for food will be 60 percent greater than it is today. The United Nations has set ending hunger and achieving food security and promoting sustainable agriculture as the second of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the year 2030.

“To achieve these objectives requires addressing a host of critical issues, from gender parity and ageing demographics to skills development and global warming,” elaborates Sumit Bose, an agriculture economist.

According to the economist, India’s agriculture sectors have to bolster productivity by adopting efficient business models and forging public-private partnerships. Achieving sustainability by addressing greenhouse gas emissions, water use and waste are also crucial, he adds.

To work towards greater food security, India is also working in close synergy with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which is not only an implementer of development projects in the country, but also a knowledge partner, adding value to existing technologies and approaches. The agency has helped India take the holistic “seed to plate” approach.

Also being addressed are challenges like livelihoods and access to food by poorer communities, sustainability of water and natural resources and soil health have moved centre stage. The idea, say experts, is to augment India’s multilateral cooperation in areas such as trans-boundary pests and diseases, livestock production, fisheries management, food safety and climate change.

FAO also provides technical assistance and capacity building to enable the transfer of best practices as well as successful lessons from other countries to replicate them to India’s agriculture system. By strengthening the resilience of smallholder farmers, food security can be guaranteed for the planet’s increasingly hungry global population while also whittling down carbon emissions.

“Growing food in a sustainable way means adopting practices that produce more with less in the same area of land and use natural resources wisely,” advises Bose. “It also means reducing food losses before the final product or retail stage through a number of initiatives including better harvesting, storage, packing, transport, infrastructure, market mechanisms, as well as institutional and legal frameworks.

“India is a long way off from all these goals. The current dispensation would do well to work towards them if it aims to bolster India’s food security and feed its poor.”

Albert Kanga's plantain farm on the outskirts of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
ABIDJAN, Cote d'Ivoire, Jul 18 2016 (IPS)

Albert Kanga Azaguie no longer considers himself a smallholder farmer. By learning and monitoring the supply and demand value chains of one of the country’s staple crops, plantain (similar to bananas), Kanga ventured into off-season production to sell his produce at relatively higher prices.

“I am now a big farmer. The logic is simple: I deal in off-season plantain. When there is almost nothing on the market, mine is ready and therefore sells at a higher price,” says Kanga, who owns a 15 Ha plantain farm 30 kilometres from Abidjan, the Ivorian capital.

Harvesting 12 tonnes on average per hectare, Kanga is one of a few farmers re-writing the African story on agriculture, defying the common tale of a poor, hungry and food-insecure region with more than 232 million undernourished people – approximately one in four.

Albert Kanga on his plantain farm. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

With an estimated food import bill valued at 35.4 billion dollars in 2015, experts consider this scenario ironic because of Africa’s potential, boasting 60 percent of the world’s unused arable land, and where 60 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, accounting for roughly a third of the continent’s GDP.

The question is why? Several reasons emerge which include structural challenges rooted in poor infrastructure, governance and weak market value chains and institutions, resulting in low productivity. Additionally, women, who form the backbone of agricultural labour, are systematically discriminated against in terms of land ownership and other incentives such as credit and inputs, limiting their opportunities to benefit from agricultural value chains.

“Women own only one percent of land in Africa, receive one percent of agricultural credit and yet, constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force,” says Buba Khan, Africa Advocacy Officer at ActionAid.

Khan believes Africa may not be able to achieve food security, let alone sovereignty, if women remain marginalised in terms of land rights, and the World Bank Agenda for Global Food System sourcebook supports the ‘closing the gender gap’ argument.

According to the sourcebook, ensuring that women have the same access to assets, inputs, and services in agriculture as men could increase women’s yields on farms by 20-30 percent and potentially reduce the number of hungry people by 12-17 percent.

But empowering women is just one of the key pieces to the puzzle. According to the African Development Bank’s Feeding Africa agenda, number two on its agenda is dealing with deep-seated structural challenges, requiring ambition and investments.

According to the Bank’s analysis, transforming agricultural value chains would require approximately 280-340 billion dollars over the next decade, and this would likely create new markets worth 55-65 billion dollars per year by 2025. And the AfDB envisages quadrupling its investments from a current annual average of US 612 million to about 2.4 billion dollars to achieve this ambition.

“Our goal is clear: achieve food self-sufficiency for Africa in 10 years, eliminate malnutrition and hunger and move Africa to the top of agricultural value chains, and accelerate access to water and sanitation,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the AfDB Group President at the 2016 Annual Meetings, highlighting that the major focus of the bank’s “Feed Africa” agenda, is transforming agriculture into a business for farmers.

But even with this ambitious goal, and the colossal financial resources on the table, the how question remains critical. Through its strategy, the Bank sets to use agriculture as a starting point for industrialisation through multi-sectoral interventions in infrastructure, intensive use of agro inputs, mechanisation, enhanced access to credit and improved land tenure systems.

Notwithstanding these well tabulated interventions, there are trade-offs required to create a balance in either system considering the climate change challenge already causing havoc in the agriculture sector. The two schools of thought for agriculture development—Intensification (more yields per unit through intensive agronomical practices) and Extensification (bringing more land under cultivation), require a right balance.

“Agriculture matters for Africa’s development, it is the single largest source of income, food and market security, and it is also the single largest source of jobs. Yet, agriculture faces some enormous challenges, the most urgent being climate change and the sector is called to act. But there are trade-offs to either approaches of up-scaling. For example, extensification entails cutting more forests and in some cases, displacing people—both of which have a negative impact on Agriculture’s role to climate change mitigation,” says Sarwatt Hussein, Head of Communications at World Bank’s Agriculture Global Practice.

And this is a point that Ivorian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mamadou Coulibaly Sangafowa, stresses regarding Agricultural investments in Africa. “The emphasis is that agricultural investments should be climate-sensitive to unlock the opportunities especially for young Africans, and stop them from crossing the Mediterranean seeking economic opportunities elsewhere,” he said.

Coulibaly, who is also president of the African conference of Agricultural Ministers, identifies the need to improve specialised agricultural communication, without which farmers would continue working in the dark. “Farmers need information about latest technologies but it is not getting to them when they need it the most,” he said, highlighting the existing information gap, which the World Bank and the African Media Initiative (AMI) have also noted regarding media coverage of Agriculture in Africa.

While agriculture accounts for well over 60 percent of national economic activity and revenue in Africa, the sector gets a disproportionately small amount of media coverage, contributing less than 10 percent to the national economic and political discourse. And this underreporting has resulted not only in limited public knowledge of what actually goes on in the sector, but also in general, misconceptions about its place in the national and regional economy, notes the AMI-World bank analysis.

Whichever route Africa uses to achieve the overall target of feeding itself and be a net food exporter by 2025, Ivorian farmer, Albert Kanga has already started the journey—thanks to the World Bank supported West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme-WAAPP, which introduced him to off-season production techniques.

According to Abdoulaye Toure, lead agro-economist at the World Bank, the WAAPP initiative which started in 2007 has changed the face of agriculture in the region. “When we started in 2007, there was a huge food deficit gap in West Africa, with productivity at around 20 percent, but it is now at 30 percent, and two similar programmes in Eastern and Southern Africa, have been launched as a result,” said Toure.

Some of the key elements of the programme include research, training of young scientists to replace the older generation, and dissemination of improved technologies to farmers. With in-country cluster research stations set up based on a particular country’s potential, there is improved information sharing on best practices.

“With new varieties introduced and off-season irrigation techniques through WAAPP, I am now an example,” says Farmer Kanga, who does not only supply to big supermarkets, but also exports to international markets such as Italy.

He recalls how he started the farm named after his late brother, Dougba, and wishes “he was alive to see how successful it has become.”

The feed Africa agenda targets to feed 150 million, and lift 100 million people out of poverty by 2025. But is it an achievable dream? Farmer Kanga is already showing that it is doable.

Farmers are in despair at the drought crisis in Southern Madagascar, where at least 1.14 million people are food insecure. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
BEKILY, Madagascar, Jun 14 2016 (IPS)

Havasoa Philomene did not have any maize when the harvesting season kicked off at the end of May since like many in the Greater South of Madagascar, she had already boiled and eaten all her seeds due to the ongoing drought.

Here, thousands of children are living on wild cactus fruits in spite of the severe constipation that they cause, but in the face of the most severe drought witnessed yet, Malagasy people have resorted to desperate measures just to survive.

“We received maize seeds in January in preparation for the planting season but most of us had eaten all the seeds within three weeks because there is nothing else to eat,” says the 53-year-old mother of seven.

She lives in Besakoa Commune in the district of Bekily, Androy region, one of the most affected in the South of Madagascar.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that an estimated 45,000 people in Bekily alone are affected, which is nearly half of the population here.

Humanitarian agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) estimate that 1.14 million people lack enough food in the seven districts of Southern Madagascar, accounting for at least 80 percent of the rural population.

The United Nations World Food Programme now says that besides Androy, other regions, including Amboassary, are experiencing a drought crisis and many poor households have resulted to selling small animals and their own clothes, as well as kitchenware, in desperate attempts to cope.

After the USAID’s Office of U.S Foreign Disaster Assistance through The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) organised an emergency response in January to provide at least 4,000 households in eight communes in the districts of Bekily and Betroka with maize seeds, many families had devoured them in less than three weeks.

Philomene told IPS that “the seeds should have been planted in February but people are very hungry.”

Due to disastrous crop production in the last harvesting season, many farmers did not produce enough seeds for the February planting season, hence the need for humanitarian agencies to meet the seed deficit.

Farmers like Rasoanandeasana Emillienne say that this is the driest rainy season in 35 years.

“I have never experienced this kind of hunger. We are taking one day at a time because who knows what will happen if the rains do not return,” says the mother of four.

Although the drought situation has been ongoing since 2013, experts such as Shalom Laison, programme director at ADRA Madagascar, says that at least 80 percent of crops from the May-June harvest are expected to fail.

The Southern part of Madagascar is the poorest, with USAID estimates showing that 90 percent of the population earns less than two dollars a day.

According to Willem Van Milink, a food security expert with the World Food Programme, “Of the one million people affected across the Southern region, 665,000 people are severely food insecure and in need of emergency food support.”

Against this backdrop, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome (FAO, IFAD and WFP), David Lane, has urged the government to declare the drought an emergency as an appeal to draw attention to the ongoing crisis.

Ambassador Lane says that though the larger Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) member states are making plans to declare an emergency situation in 13 countries in the southern region, including Madagascar, “the government of Madagascar needs to make an appeal for help.”

“Climate change is getting more and more volatile but the world does not know what is happening in Southern Madagascar and this region is indicative of what is happening in a growing number of countries in Southern Africa,” he told IPS during his May 16-21 visit to Madagascar.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), these adverse weather conditions have reduced crop production in other Southern African nations where an estimated 14 million people face hunger in countries including Southern Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi and South Africa.

Thousands of households are living precarious lives in the regions of Androy, Anosy and Atsimo Andrefana in Southern Madagascar  because they are unable to meet their basic food and non-food needs through September due to the current El Niño event, which has translated into a pronounced dry spell.

“An appeal is very important to show that the drought is longer than usual, hence the need for urgent but also more sustainable solutions,” says USAID’s Dina Esposito.

The ongoing situation is different from chronic malnutrition, she stressed. “This is about a lack of food and not just about micronutrients and people are therefore much too thin for their age.”

She says that the problem with a slow onset disaster like a drought as compared to a fast onset disaster like a cyclone – also common in the South – is to determine when to draw the line and declare the situation critical.

Esposito warns that the worst is yet to come since food insecurity is expected to escalate in terms of severity and magnitude in the next lean season from December 2016 to February 2017.

Tsering Dorji works on his farm in western Bhutan’s Satsam village. Due to inadequate transportation and marketing opportunities, he loses half of what he produces every rainy season. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
COPENHAGEN, Jun 8 2016 (IPS)

Four years ago, 27-year-old Tsering Dorji of western Bhutan’s Satsam village took to organic vegetable farming. Since then, thanks to composted manure and organic pesticide, the soil health of his farm has improved, and the yield has increased manifold.

Dorji, once a subsistence farmer, now has about 60 bags of surplus food every two months to sell and earn a profit.  But come the rainy season and he still loses thousands of rupees carrying his produce to markets that are miles away.

“Vegetables like radish, carrot and cucumber often break and tomatoes get squashed when I transport them. So I have to either sell them for [the deeply discounted price of ] 5-10 rupees a kg or just throw them away. This is very a hard time for me,” Dorji told IPS.

The young farmer is not alone. The world over, but especially in developing countries, farmers lose millions of dollars due to food loss. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the total bill for food loss and food waste is a whooping 940 billion dollars a year.

The scenario could, however, change significantly in coming years courtesy of a new global mechanism called the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard. Launched at the 4^th Global Green Growth Forum (3GF) a two-day conference held in Copenhagen from June 6-7, this is a protocol to map the extent and the reasons for food loss and food waste across the world.

The conference, which brought together governments, investors, corporations, NGOs and research organisations, termed it a great ‘breakthrough” – one that could lead to effective control and prevention of global food loss and food waste.

“The new Food Loss and Waste Standard will reduce economic losses for the consumer and the food industry, alleviate the pressure on natural resources and contribute to realising the ambitious goals set out in the SDGs, “said Christian Jensen, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Denmark, launching the protocol.

The Global Green Growth Forum, a two-day conference in Copenhagen June 6-7, 2016, on attaining green growth in business, in alignment with the SDGs. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

The protocol

The Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard (FLW) has been developed jointly by the Consumer Goods Forum, the FAO, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Specific guidelines for how the standard will instruct countries and companies to measure their food waste are still being drafted, but the protocol includes three components.

The first is that the standard includes modular definitions of food waste that change based on what an entity’s end goal is — so if a country is interested in curbing food waste to fight food insecurity, its definition of food waste will be different than a country looking to curb food waste to fight climate change.

Secondly, the standard includes diverse quantification options, which will allow a country or company with fewer financial or technical resources to obtain a general picture of their food loss and waste.

And finally, the standard is meant to be flexible enough to evolve over time, as understanding of food waste, quantification methods, and available data improves.

Sustainable Development Goal 12.3

Food loss and waste has significant economic, social, and environmental consequences. According to the FAO, a third of the food produced in the world is lost while transporting it from where it is produced to where it is eaten, even as 800 million people remain malnourished.

In short, food loss increases hunger. The lost and wasted food also consumes about one quarter of all water used by agriculture and, in terms of land use, uses cropland area the size of China, besides generating about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Target 12.3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addresses this he global food challenge by seeking to halve per capita food waste and reduce food losses by 2030.

The FLW Protocol can help steer the movement forward, say UN officials. According to Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the protocol could not only help understand just how much food is “not making it to our mouths, but will help set a baseline for action”.

The protocol has also triggered the interest of business leaders like the world’s largest food company, Nestle. “What gets measured can be managed. At Nestle, we will definitely benefit significantly by using the standard to help us address our own food loss and waste,” said Michiel Kernkamp, Nestle Nordic Market chief.

Benefiting the poorest growers

But can the FLW protocol benefit the smallest and the poorest of the food producers in the developing countries who lack modern technology, innovation, and regular finance and are surrounded by multiple climate vulnerabilities such as flood, drought, salinity and other natural disasters?

“Yes,” says Khalid Bomba, CEO of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency.

The protocol, by identifying the pockets of food loss, can highlight the areas that need urgent intervention, he says.

“For ordinary proof producers, food loss happens for a number of reasons such as lack of innovative tools, improved seeds, market opportunity and climate change. The new protocol can be a tool to find out how much losses are happening due to each of these reasons. Once this data is collected, it can be shared with the NGOs and the business communities. Accordingly, they can decide how and where they want to intervene and what solutions they want to apply.”

Bomba, however, cautions that the protocol should not be mistaken for a solution. “This protocol in itself cannot end food loss. It is just a tool to understand the problem better and find the appropriate solution.”

Felistas Ngoma, 72, from Nkhamenya in the Kasungu District of Malawi, prepares nsima in her kitchen. Credit: Charity Chimungu Phiri/IPS

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, May 27 2016 (IPS)

It’s Saturday, market day at the popular Bvumbwe market in Thyolo district. About 40 kilometers away in Chiradzulu district, a vegetable vendor and mother of five, Esnart Nthawa, 35, has woken up at three a.m. to prepare for the journey to the market.

The day before, she went about her village buying tomatoes and okra from farmers, which she has safely packed in her dengu (woven basket).

Now she’s just waiting for a hired bicycle to take her and her merchandise to the bus station, where she will catch a minibus to Bvumbwe market. This way, her goods reach the market quicker and safer. Afterwards, she and her colleagues will pack their baskets and walk back home.

“We walk for at least three hours…our bodies have just gotten used to it because we have no choice. If I don’t do this, then my children will suffer. As I am talking to you now, they are waiting for me to bring them food,” Nthawa told IPS.

“I will buy a basin of maize there at the maize mill and have it processed into flour for nsima [a thick porridge that is Malawi’s staple food]. That’s the only meal they will eat today,” she said.

Nthawa added: “Last harvest we only realised two bags of maize as you know the weather was bad. That maize has now run out, we are living day by day…eating what we can manage to source for that day.”

Nthawa’s story resonates with many Malawians today. Almost half of the country’s population is facing hunger this year due to no or low harvests, resulting from the effects of El Nino which hit most parts of the southern and northern regions late last year.

Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development George Chaponda said in Parliament on May 25 that 8.4 million Malawians will be food insecure during the 2016/2017 season.

His statement clearly contradicts President Peter Mutharika, who on Friday said in his State of the Nation Address that 2.8 million people faced hunger.

The new high figure follows a World Food Programme Rapid assessment which said over eight million Malawians will be food insecure this year due to the effects of El Nino. Destructive floods in the north have compounded the country’s woes, causing the president to declare a state of emergency in April.

With the drought also affecting Zimbabwe and other countries in southern Africa, an estimated 28 million people are now going hungry.

In order to deal with the crisis, Agriculture Minister Chaponda says the government has “laid out a plan to import about one million metric tons of white maize to fill the food gap”. The authorities project that at least 1,290,000 metric tons of maize are needed to deal with the food crisis, out of which 790,000 metric tons will be distributed to those heavily affected by the drought starting from April 2016 to March 2017.

The government also plans to intensify irrigation on commercial and smallholder farms, with an aim of increasing maize production at the national level. Officials say 18 million dollars is needed to carry out these measures.“There’s too much politicisation and overreliance on maize as a crop for consumption." -- Chairperson of the Right to Food Network Billy Mayaya

In the meantime, food prices continue to rise daily as the national currency, the Kwacha, continues to depreciate, forcing poor farming families to reduce their number of meals per day or sell their property in order to cope with the situation. A bag of maize which normally sells for seven dollars now costs 15 dollars.

As usual, children have been hardest hit by the situation. The latest statistics on Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) show a 100 percent increase from December 2015 to January 2016, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

UNICEF says it recorded more than 4,300 cases of severe malnutrition in the month of January alone this year, double the number recorded in December 2015.

Dr. Queen Dube, a pediatrician at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre – the main government referral hospital in southern Malawi – affirmed to IPS that there has been an increase in the number of malnutrition cases at the hospital.

“At the moment, we have about 15 children admitted at our Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit…they have Marasmus, where they’re very thin or wasted, while others have Kwashiorkor, where the body is swollen. In other cases, the children have a combination of the two. These children suffer greatly from diarrheal diseases,” said Dube.

She added that the hospital offers these children therapeutic feeding of special types of milk and chiponde (fortified peanut butter) for a determined period of time, until they pick up in weight and improve in general body appearance.

“They are also given treatment for any underlying illness which they might have. Additionally, we also provide counseling to the mothers and guardians on proper nutrition so that when they get back home they can utilize the very little foods they have to prepare nutritious meals for their children,” she explained.

Rights activists say it is high time the authorities started taking on board recommendations on how to make Malawi food secure made by independent groups such as the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee-MVAC, which said 2.8 million people faced hunger in 2015.

Chairperson of the Right to Food Network Billy Mayaya told IPS: “There’s too much politicisation and overreliance on maize as a crop for consumption. The government needs to use the data from MVAC as well as consider the Green Belt Initiative (GBI) and modalities to bring it to fruition.

Calling for greater diversity in the traditional diet, he said, “These plans can be effected as long as there‘s a sustained political will.”

In his state of the nation address on May 20, President Mutharika said the Green Belt Initiative was still his government’s priority “in order to increase productivity of selected high value crops.

“I am therefore pleased to report that construction of the irrigation infrastructure and the sugarcane factory in Salima district has been completed…the government has an ongoing Land Management Contract with Malawi Mangoes Limited where land has been provided for the production of bananas and mangoes,” he said.

In addition, the president said the government plans to increase rice production for both consumption and export, as well as make the tobacco industry vibrant again. Malawi mainly relies on tobacco for its foreign exchange earnings.

In February, President Mutharika made an international appeal for assistance, following which development partners including Britain and Japan provided over 35 million dollars. The government also obtained 80 million dollars from the World Bank for the Emergency Floods Recovery Project.

The U.S. government has been the first to respond to the latest crisis, providing the Malawian government with 55 million dollars.

Meanwhile, the struggle for survival continues for poor Malawian families such as Esnart Nthawa’s. Her children are still eating one meal a day, as those in power continue to meet to strategize on the crisis over fancy dinners in expensive hotels.

Over 600 delegates representing at least 570 million farms scattered around the world gathered in Zambia from May 4-7 under the umbrella of the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO) to discuss climate change, land tenure, innovations and capacity building as four pillars on which to build agricultural development.

Among the local delegates was Mary Nyirenda, a farmer from Livingstone, where the assembly was held.

“I have a 35-hectare farm but only use five hectares due to water stress. With one borehole, I am only able to irrigate limited fields. I gave up on rainfall in the 2013/14 season when I lost about five hectares of maize to drought,” Nyirenda told IPS.

Privileged to be part of the 2016 WFO General Assembly, Nyirenda hoped to learn innovative ways to improve productivity and market access for her garden and poultry produce. But did the conference meet her expectations?

Mary Nyirenda in her garden at her farm in Livingstone, Zambia. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

“Yes it has, especially on market access. I’ve learnt that working as groups gives us a strong voice and bargaining power. I’ve been struggling on my own but now I understand that two is better than one, and so my task from here is to strengthen our cooperative which is still disjointed in terms of producer partnerships,” said Nyirenda, emphasising the power of farmer organisations – for which WFO exists.

Convened under the theme ‘Partnerships for Growth’, the clarion call by delegates throughout the conference was to change the narrative that, while they are at the centre of a multi-billion-dollar food sector, responsible for feeding the whole world, farmers are the world’s poorest people.

And WFO President Evelyn Nguleka says the situation has to change. “It is true that farmers in almost all corners of the world constitute the majority poor, but the question is why?” asked Nguleka while responding to journalists during the closing WFO General Assembly Press briefing.

She said the meeting established that poor organisation and lack of information were the major reasons for farmers’ lack of progress, noting, “If farmers remain in isolation, they will continue to be poor.”

“It is for this reason that we developed a legal tool on contract farming, which will be mostly useful for smallholders whose knowledge on legal matters is low, and are easily taken advantage of,” said David Velde, president of the National Farmers Union in the U.S. and a board member of WFO.

Velde told IPS that various tools would be required to help smallholders be well equipped to fully benefit from their work, especially in a world with an unstable climate, a sub-theme that found space in all discussions at the conference due to its multifaceted nature.

With technology transfer being one of the key elements of the sustainable development agenda as enshrined in the Paris climate deal, delegates established that both innovation and capacity building for farmers to improve productivity cannot be discussed in a vacuum.

“Agriculture is indeed a global sector that needs serious attention. The fact that a world farmers’ organization exists is a sign that food production, food security, climate change are global issues that cannot be looked at in isolation. Farmers need information on best methods and technologies on how best to enhance productivity in a climate conscious manner,” said Zambian President Edgar Lungu in his address to the WFO General Assembly.

In the world’s quest to feed the hungry 793 million people by 2030, and and the projected population growth expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, more than half in Africa, WFO is alive to the huge task that its members have, which can only be fulfilled through increased productivity.

“WFO is in recognition that the world has two conflicting issues on face value—to feed the world and mitigate climate change. Both require huge resources but we believe that it is possible to tackle both, through increased productivity using latest technology,” said William Rolleston, president of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand.

Rolleston, who is also Vice President of WFO, told IPS that while WFO’s work does not involve funding farmers, it helps its members to innovate and forge partnerships for growth.

It has long been recognised globally that climate change, if not tackled, could be a barrier to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And this presented, perhaps, the hardest of choices that world leaders had to make—tackling climate change, with huge implications on the world’s productive capacity, which has over the years largely relied on a carbon intensive economy.

By approving the SDGs and the historic climate agreement last year, the world’s socio-economic agenda is set for a complete paradigm shift. However, WFO President Evelyn Nguleka wants farmers to remain the focus of the world’s policies.

“Whatever changes the world decides moving forward, it should not be at the expense of farmers to survive and be profitable,” she stressed.

For Nyirenda, access to markets holds the key to farmers’ productive capacity, especially women, who, according to FAO, constitute half of the global agricultural labour force, while in Africa, the figure is even higher—80 percent.

“My interactions with international organisations such as IFAD and others who are interested in women empowerment was a serious-eye opener moving forward,” she said.

One of the most significant aspects of the international conference on climate change, concluded in Paris on December 12, is that food security and ending hunger feature in the global agenda of the climate change debate.

The text of the final agreement adopted by the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognizes “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger and the special vulnerability of food systems production to the impacts of climate change.”

Indeed, of the 186 countries that presented voluntary plans to reduce emissions, around a hundred include measures related to land use and agriculture.

The approved programme of measures constitutes a sector-by-sector program to be implemented by 2020, which implies there will be ongoing focus on agricultural issues and not just about energy, mitigation or transportation, which drew so much of the attention in Paris.

In the next years the commitments must be implemented, which will require helping developing countries make necessary adaptations through technology transfer and capacity building.

The Green Climate Fund, comprising 100,000 million per year provided by the industrialized countries, will be a key contributor to this process. Contributions of additional resources to the Fund for the Least Developed Countries and the Adaptation Fund, among others, have also been announced.

The issue of future food production, long saddled with a low profile in the media, is increasingly a major concern and poses a challenge to governments.

A recent World Bank report estimated that 100 million people could fall into poverty in the next 15 years due to climate change. Agricultural productivity will suffer, in turn causing higher food prices.

According to Jose Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “climate change affects especially countries that have not contributed to causing the problem” and “particularly harms developing countries and the poorer classes.”

The facts speak for themselves. The world’s 50 poorest countries combined, are responsible for only one per cent of global greenhouse emissions, yet these nations are the ones most affected by climate change.

Approximately 75 per cent of poor people suffering from food insecurity depend on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. Under current projections, it will be necessary to increase food production by 60 per cent to feed the world’s population in 2050.

Yet crop yields will, if current trends continue, fall by 10 to 20 per cent in the same period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and higher ocean temperatures will slash fishing yields by 40 per cent.

One of the least-mentioned problems associated with climate change are the effects of droughts and floods, which have become a near constant reality. On top of the destruction of resources and huge losses brought by these phenomena, they also cause increases in food prices which in turn affects mainly the poor and most vulnerable.

Rising food prices have a direct relation to “climate migrants”, as the drop in production and income is one of the factors that triggers displacement from rural areas to cities, as well as from the poorest countries to those where there are potentially more opportunities to work and have a dignified life.

For example, migration in Syria and Somalia are not driven by political conflicts or security issues alone, but also by drought and the consequent food shortages.

This is why FAO argues that we must simultaneously solve climate change and the great challenges of development and hunger. These two scenarios go hand-in-hand. The dilemma is to make sure that measures adopted to address the former do not generate a constraint on the latter. Production capacity, particularly of developing countries, must not be jeopardized.

This is why developing countries argue that, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they need technologies and support that they cannot fund with their own resources without hobbling their own development plans.

And since the most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are the industrialized nations, the countries of the South insist, and have done so long before the COP21, that richer nations contribute to funding the changes needed to preserve the environment.

It was therefore natural that this dilemma was at the center of discussions in Paris and that efforts were made to find an agreement.

The creation of the Green Climate Fund was one of the keystones for an agreement that practically binds the whole world to the goal of keeping average temperatures at the end of the century from rising more than two degrees Celsius. The agreement will enter into force in 2020 and will be reviewed every five years. In that period, many problems will arise and need to be resolved.

Yet beyond the difficulties we will face on the way, it now seems legitimate to expect that the big problem will be addressed and the future of the planet will be preserved.

(End)

Successive poor harvests have diminished Ndodana Makhalima’s household food stocks and the family’s nutrition status.

A subsistence farmer in Lupane, about 110 kilometres north of Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, 56 year-old Makhalima has learnt to live with hunger on his door step.

Farmers will have limited access to climate smart agricultural knowledge and skills as cash strapped Zimbabwe cuts technical assistance from agricultural extension officers. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“In the past I could eat umxhanxa (a mix of maize and melon) and inkobe (a mix of maize, cow peas, and groundnuts) throughout the year, but not anymore,” Makhalima said.

“My silo is empty and my family has nothing to eat. I think today’s children will never know the kind of body-building foods we ate when I was young,” he said, highlighting the extent of compromised household
nutrition across rural Zimbabwe.

The country’s rural-based subsistence farmers are facing a myriad of challenges with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) warning of another drought during the 2015/16 season, which could further compromise already dire nutritional needs in a country where the UN World Food Programme (WFP) says millions will require food assistance.

But it is the financing of the sector, once a major contributor to the country’s GDP, that has further dwindled hopes for relief for Makhalima and millions of other rural farmers.

Zimbabwe requires millions of dollars to fund irrigation schemes dotted across the country and while the climate ministry and the meteorological services department announced a cloud seeding exercise in October to boost rainfall, this is yet to take off.

The meteorological office also announced it would be buying an aeroplane for cloud seeding, but the department has previously complained of financial constraints that have affected its operations. It is not clear where financing for the aircraft will come from. Experts however say cloud seeding can be done when there are particular clouds that favour the exercise.

Announcing the national budget on 26 Nov, Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said agriculture will require 1, 7 billion dollars, while setting aside 28 million dollars to fund farming inputs for 300,000 vulnerable rural households.

Under the scheme, small-holder farmers will receive maize and small grain seed and fertiliser.

But farmer unions say more will be required beyond these hand-outs as the country’s rain-fed agriculture faces
prolonged dry spells.
”The importance of this sector lies in its contribution to export earnings of around 30 per cent, 60-70 per cent of employment and about 19 per cent of GDP, that way providing a major source of livelihood for over 70 per cent [of the population],” Chinamasa told parliament in his budget presentation.

According to Chinamasa, agriculture production, which saw a plunge of 51 per cent from the 2013/14 season, will recover by 1.8 per cent despite the climate ministry’s warning that 2015/16 will be a
drought year.
The day after the budget presentation, Minister Chinamasa told a breakfast meeting that Zimbabwe would sign a 60-million dollar agreement with the UN International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) to finance irrigation which the agriculture ministry is touting as a solution to boost agriculture production.

Yet subsistence farmers, who have relied on technical assistance from agriculture extension officers, could face tougher times ahead after the finance minister announced that these officers will face the chop as part of government efforts to reduce its wage bill.
These cuts come at a time when farmers seek new farming knowledge and skills to deal with climate vulnerability blamed for poor harvests.

The Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC), established by government and which sets benchmarks for rural nutrition with support from the UN World Food Programme, says 1.5 million people or 16 per cent of the country’s rural population, are food insecure. ZimVAC notes that this is a163 per cent increase from last year.

Development agencies have tied nutrition to people’s ability to lead productive lives with access to nutrition especially emphasised for vulnerable groups such as people living with HIV and Aids. WFP is already assisting malnourished HIV and Aids and tuberculosis patients around the country through the Health and Nutrition programme, with the potential to assist millions of patients living in rural areas according to the country’s health ministry.

There are, however, concerns that failed agriculture and poor harvests that have depleted household food stocks will make it difficult for HIV and Aids patients to access much needed nutritional support — a
vital requirement in anti-retroviral therapy.

During the October World Food Day commemorations led by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and WFP, FAO Sub-Regional Coordinator for Southern Africa and Representative in Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Botswana, David Phiri, noted that the UN in Zimbabwe “recognises that in order to achieve inclusive agricultural development and food and nutrition security, targeted social protection programmes should be in place.”

As part of efforts to improve agriculture production and nutrition, FAO and WFP are assisting small-holders in adopting climate smart agriculture, complementing government efforts that emphasise rehabilitation of irrigation schemes across the country.

These interventions could offer much-need relief for farmers like Makhalima, for whom agriculture is vital for nutrition and income.

(End)

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vikas Rawal
ROME, Dec 14 2015 (IPS)

The US once led the post-war global effort against hunger and food insecurity, but corporate influence on government trade negotiators now seek to prevent other countries from using some of the very measures it pioneered.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

India’s food security and stockholding programs use the same policies that the United States used in its early farm policy from the Great Depression, utilizing price supports, food reserves, administered markets and subsidies.

Historically, the US farm and other related programmes have done much to raise productivity, as intended by the Indian and many other developing country efforts. The US used these measures because they work, but now seeks to prevent other countries from using them.

Food security

The US spends about 75 billion dollars per year for its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the main domestic food aid program. SNAP entitles about 47 million beneficiaries to buy, on average, 240 kg of grain valued at 1,608 dollars per year.

Before expanding its food security program, India was reaching 475 million much hungrier people with food aid of just 58 kg of grain per person, valued at roughly 27 dollars per year. Compared to the US program, India’s food security program has ten times as many beneficiaries, and provides less than a quarter of the amount of grain per capita, valued at a sixth of the cost per person.

India’s food distribution system was introduced decades ago. In 2009-10, the program was responsible for taking 38 million people out of poverty. India’s procurement and stockholding program is for domestic consumption, and does not subsidize exports. But just to be on the safe side, restrictions on subsidized Indian food exports can be imposed.

Trade liberalization

The main difference has been compliance with the two decade old WTO regulations, with its Agreement on Agriculture. WTO-led trade liberalization has not only undermined industrialization, but also food production in many countries. Hence, most developing countries have seen at least some of their existing productive capacities and capabilities eroded, partly accounting for the slower growth since the 1980s.

The subsidy element in India’s administered prices is calculated by comparing them to an international “reference price” for 1986-88, not to market prices in India. The 1986-88 reference prices were especially low because the US and the EU were then “dumping” huge food surpluses on the international market, pushing down prices.

Despite the recent decline of cereal prices internationally, food price inflation since 1986-88 has been very considerable, so any price support today looks very high, involving huge subsidies. Inter alia, India has asked that the reference prices be updated for inflation, so its administered prices can be reasonably compared to current market prices.

The allowed levels of trade-distorting support – the Aggregate Measure of Support (AMS) – for the US is about 19 billion dollars. The level was set in 1994, based on prevailing high levels of trade-distorting support in the West and Japan, and has been reduced by only a fifth since then.

In contrast, like 61 of the 71 developing country WTO members in 1994, India’s AMS was zero. Most developing countries then were under considerable pressure to cut government spending after facing fiscal and debt crises from the early 1980s.

The US has also been underreporting its trade-distorting subsidies for years. For example, a WTO dispute panel has ruled that insurance subsidies and direct payments should count as trade-distorting subsidies. If corrected, US AMS notifications for 2010 should have risen from $4 billion to 15 billion dollars.

The WTO’s ‘Green Box’ includes permissible, supposedly non-trade-distorting subsidies. About $120 billion of the US’s 130 dollar billion in food programs and farm supports qualify, much more than for other countries with larger populations.

Most US subsidies – AMS and Green Box – go to crops like maize, soybeans, wheat and cotton that are heavily exported. As maize and soybeans are used for livestock feed, maize is the main input for US bio-ethanol and the US exports both meat and ethanol, such input subsidies should be declared as trade-distorting, but are still treated as non-trade-distorting subsidies.

Peace Clause

In 1994, the US and the EU imposed a Peace Clause at the end of the protracted Uruguay Round of trade negotiations to protect themselves for nine years from WTO suits over their hugely distorting subsidies.

In 2005, the WTO committed to resolve, “in an expedited manner,” the issue of the US’s trade-distorting cotton subsidies, which hurt many of the world’s poorest farmers. A decade later, cotton producers the world over are still awaiting US compliance.

Over the last two decades, WTO restrictions and pressures from international finance institutions have forced many developing countries to cut their food subsidies, with dire consequences for its mainly poor and hungry beneficiaries.

The 2013 Peace Clause offered to India and the G-33 group of developing countries excludes subsidies, prohibits expansion of existing programmes and introduction of new food distribution programmes, and may not apply beyond 2017 even if the outstanding Doha issues remain unresolved.

In the post-war period, the US has been prominent in the global effort against hunger and food insecurity despite not acknowledging the “right to food.” Many innovations adopted by the international community have their origins in the US. Narrow corporate interests should not be allowed to undermine this heritage.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Dec 11 2015 (IPS)

The latest estimates are that over two billion people in the world suffer some micronutrient deficiencies, often referred to as “hidden hunger.” The main sustainable solution is to ensure adequate public health interventions, including clean water, sanitation and hygiene as well as healthy, diverse diets for all.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

In the short term, however, it will be necessary to provide supplements of vitamins, minerals and trace elements to those especially vulnerable, e.g. due to displacement and emergency situations. There is a general consensus that such needs of pregnant and lactating mothers should be especially prioritized due to the intergenerational consequences of child stunting for such reasons.

Developing countries should be able to affordably access locally produced or imported generics of the vitamin and mineral supplements they require. Many current options associated with public-private partnership will instead strengthen the vested interests of the lucrative, large and fast-growing industry for nutrition supplements.

The need for supplementation to address urgent, short-term micronutrient deficiencies should qualify as part of the public health exception to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This has not been fully recognized ostensibly because people do not drop dead immediately due to “hidden hunger.”

TRIPS and generics production for developing countries

Under the TRIPS agreement, intellectual property rights (IPRs) — for copyright, trademark, geographical indication, industrial designs and patents — are extended to all signatory countries. Patents, most relevant to public health and access to medicines, give twenty years of protection to inventions.

In the current language, there are no explicit provisions for generic production of patented nutrition supplements. However, there is supposed to be a great deal of flexibility on the basis of public health needs, which could be extended to minerals and vitamins for supplementation.

The TRIPS Agreement provides space for countries taking measures to protect public health. Under Article 31, countries can issue compulsory licenses allowing firms or individuals to produce generic copies of patented products or processes for the domestic market without the owner’s consent in “case of a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency or in cases of public non-commercial use.” The government can also determine adequate payment to the IPR holder.

At the Doha WTO conference in 2001 launching the Doha Development Round of trade negotiations, the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health affirmed the right of countries to protect public health, enable access to medicines, and determine the criteria for issuing a compulsory license. It emphasized that each country “has the right to grant compulsory licenses” and “the right to determine what constitutes a national health emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency.”

This new text corrected the false impression that some health emergency was needed to justify compulsory licensing. It also spelt out that “public health crises, including those relating to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics, can represent a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency.”

Technology transfer

Under Article 66.2 of TRIPS, developed country governments are obliged to actively promote technology transfer in establishing manufacturing capabilities for patented processes in developing countries. The 2001 Declaration also reaffirmed the developed countries’ commitment to provide incentives to their corporations to enable technology transfer to the least developed countries. This was part of the original bargain for developing countries to provide protection of IPRs.

Developing countries also have the right to import generics if they lack manufacturing capabilities. A 2003 waiver allows countries unable to domestically produce pharmaceuticals to import them instead. Hence, under compulsory licensing, such countries can import externally produced patented drugs. Thus, while compulsory licensing allows countries to import cheaper generics from countries already producing them, to take advantage of TRIPS Agreement flexibility, countries need to legislate accordingly.

However, exemptions to pharmaceutical patent protection to the least developed countries, enabling them to import without issuing a compulsory license, were only extended until 2016. The upcoming Nairobi WTO ministerial should extend this exemption beyond next year.

While there appears to be legal space under TRIPS for developing countries to use compulsory licensing, they have effectively be prevented from doing this by complicated rules and procedural requirements. Consequently, use of compulsory licensing by developing countries has been largely limited to HIV/AIDS medicines, and almost exclusively used by middle-income countries. LDCs have not issued any compulsory licenses while the total number of applications has declined significantly in the last decade.

Needed actions

Existing TRIPS texts do not preclude compulsory licensing for local generic production in developing countries. However, extension of the right to use compulsory licensing and other such flexibilities to vitamin and mineral supplements is not explicit. While explicit permission is given to AIDs, malaria, tuberculosis and epidemics, even this is rarely used.

In light of the foregoing, the following revisions to WTO provisions to protect developing countries’ right to produce generic vitamin and mineral supplements should be introduced. This will also be in line with the July 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda’s commitment to facilitate technology transfer:

• Developing appropriate model legislation to facilitate development of the national legislation needed for compulsory licensing, etc.
• Provide free legal services to developing country governments interested in accessing TRIPS facilities.
• Identify and investigate relevant national vitamin and mineral supplement production needs in partnership with other governments to enable developed countries to meet their technology transfer obligations.

Developing countries need to act to overcome three major constraints to issuing compulsory licenses and bypassing patent legislation for public health. First, the governments must be strong enough to withstand business and political pressures. Second, it is necessary to have enabling legislation in place. Third, these countries need to have production capacity and distribution arrangements in place.
Also, the UN system should offer appropriate technical expertise to advance progress.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Nov 19 2015 (IPS)

At the end of 2014, an estimated 795 million people – one in nine people worldwide – were estimated to be chronically hungry. All but 15 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries, i.e., 780 million are in developing countries, where the share of the hungry has declined by less than half – from 23.4 per cent in 1991 to 12.9 per cent.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

Overall progress has been highly uneven. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions.

There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean South-East Asia, East Asia, Central Asia—where the target of halving the hunger rate has been reached.

Progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been more limited, and the region now has the highest prevalence of undernourishment. West Asia is the only region that has seen a rise in the share of the hungry, while progress in South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist among children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

One in seven children under five are underweight

An estimated 99 million children under five years of age were underweight in 2012. This represents a fall of 38 per cent from an estimated 160 million underweight children in 1990. Yet, 15 per cent, or about one in seven of all children under five worldwide, are underweight.

East Asia has led all regions with the largest decrease of underweight children since 1990, followed by the Caucasus and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and West Asia. While the proportion of underweight children was highest in South Asia, the region has also experienced the largest absolute decrease since 1990, contributing significantly to the global decrease over the period. Despite a modest reduction in the proportion of underweight children, Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region where the number of undernourished children increased, rising from 27 million in 1990 to 32 million in 2012.

In 2013, about 17%, or 98 million children under five years of age in developing countries were underweight. Underweight is most prevalent in South Asia (30%), followed by West Africa (21%), Oceania and East Africa (both 19%) and South-East Asia and Central Africa (both 16%) and Southern Africa (12%). Prevalence of underweight was below 10% in 2013 in East, Central and West Asia, North Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Globally, the proportion of underweight children under five years of age declined from 25 per cent to 15 per cent between 1990 and 2013. Africa experienced the smallest decrease, with underweight prevalence declining from 23 per cent in 1990 to 17 per cent in 2013 while in Asia, it fell from 32 per cent to 18 per cent, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, from 8 per cent to 3 per cent.

This means Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean are likely to meet the MDG target for underweight, while Africa is likely to fall short, achieving only about half of the reduction target. And although Asia as a whole is likely to meet the MDG target, underweight rates remain very high in South Asia (30%). With its large, growing population, South Asia was home to 53 million underweight children in 2013.

One in four children under five are stunted

Stunting—defined as inadequate length or height for age—is a better indicator than underweight for capturing the cumulative effects of child undernutrition and infection during the critical 1,000-day period from conception through the first two years of a child’s life. Stunting is also more common than underweight, with one in four children globally affected in 2012.

Stunting is caused by long-term inadequate dietary intake and continuing bouts of infection and disease, often beginning with maternal malnutrition, which leads to poor fetal growth, low birth weight and poor growth. Stunting causes permanent impairment to cognitive and physical development that can lower educational attainment and reduce adult incomes.

Although the prevalence of stunting in children under five fell from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2012, an estimated 161 million children under five in 2014 remained at risk of diminished cognitive and physical development due to chronic undernutrition. Nearly all regions in the world have seen declines in the number of children affected by stunting. The sad exception is sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of stunted children increased by a third, from 44 million to 58 million between 1990 and 2012.

Lessons

In countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting. Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water, sanitation and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, as well as more effective, resources and other means to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

The Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on 19-21 November 2014 articulated coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome all types of malnutrition (undernourishment, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity) and defined pathways for international cooperation and support for integrated national nutrition efforts. The international community, including those in the UN system, must now come together to improve coordination for a sustained effort against malnutrition over the next decade.

But with high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world for the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome on a sustainable basis without the extension of universal social protection to all, especially those in need.

(End)

Excerpt:

The UN’s heavily-hyped Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were approved by more than 160 world leaders at a summit meeting in September, are an integral part of the world body’s post-2015 development agenda, including the eradication of hunger and poverty by 2030.

But that ambitious goal, warns the UN’s sister institution, the World Bank, can be thwarted by the devastating impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people.

In a new study released Monday, the World Bank says climate change is already preventing people from escaping poverty.

“And without rapid, inclusive and climate-smart development, together with emissions-reductions efforts that protect the poor, there could be more than 100 million additional people in poverty by 2030.”

The report, released ahead of the international climate conference in Paris November 30-December 11, finds that poor people are already at high risk from climate-related shocks, including crop failures from reduced rainfall, spikes in food prices after extreme weather events, and increased incidence of diseases after heat waves and floods.

Titled ‘Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty’, the study says such shocks could wipe out hard-won gains, leading to irreversible losses and, driving people back into poverty, particularly in Africa and South Asia.

According to the report, the poorest people are more exposed than the average population to climate-related shocks such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, and they lose much more of their wealth when they are hit.

In the 52 countries where data was available, 85 per cent of the population live in countries where poor people are more exposed to drought than the average.

Poor people are also more exposed to higher temperatures and live in countries where food production is expected to decrease because of climate change, the report notes.

“This report sends a clear message that ending poverty will not be possible unless we take strong action to reduce the threat of climate change on poor people and dramatically reduce harmful emissions,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

“Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,” he added.

Asked for a response, Harjeet Singh, Climate Policy Manager at ActionAid, told IPS the World Bank’s analysis of poor people’s vulnerability to climate impacts is not new, but it rightly highlights that poverty cannot be addressed without tackling climate change.

He said poor people and poor countries are most vulnerable to climate change as they have limited assets, skills and knowledge to overcome the effects.

“However, the World Bank is coming late to the game with its talk of improving social protection to fight the effects of climate change”, Singh said.

In reality, he pointed out, the World Bank has had a long and dubious record of forcing developing countries to reduce their public expenditure to provide basic services, and protecting socially and economically weaker populations.

“It will need to address this before it can reliably practise what the report preaches,” he declared.

Louise Whiting, senior policy analyst, water security and climate change at the UK-based WaterAid, told IPS the world’s poorest are most at risk from climate change and are receiving the least amount of climate-change financing to help them adapt to climate-related weather shocks including flood, drought and heat waves.

“Our research tells us that in Bangladesh alone, an estimated 38 million lives are at risk between now and 2050 because of climate-change related disasters,” she pointed out.

“The climate path we are on now means an end to development – an end to all progress on extreme poverty.”

She said for families living in extreme poverty, with fragile access to safe water, good sanitation and hygiene, these lengthening dry seasons and intensifying monsoons wipe out years of work and further entrench the cycle of poverty.

“Safeguarding basic services including clean water, sanitation and hygiene helps communities recover faster and become more resilient to climactic extremes.”

Whiting said national governments in developing countries need more support in designing and implementing projects to help eradicate poverty while building communities’ resilience to climate change, as well as financing.

Leaders at this month’s crucial talks in Paris must not forget the world’s poorest, and include a strong focus on helping them to adapt to this challenging new reality, she added.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa as starvation hits even town and city dwellers. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Sep 2 2015 (IPS)

There is a scramble for unoccupied land in Africa, but this time it is not British, Portuguese, French or other colonialists racing to occupy the continent’s vacant land – it is the continent’s urban dwellers fast turning to urban farming amid the rampant food shortages that have not spared them.

Inadequate wages have aggravated the situation of many, like Agness Samwenje who lives in Harare’s high density Mufakose suburb, and they have found that turning to urban farming is one way of supplementing their supply of food.

Samwenje, a pre-school teacher who took over an open piece of land to cultivate in vicinity to a farm, told IPS that “this mini-farming here is a back-up means to feed my family because the 200 dollars I earn monthly is not enough to support my family after becoming the breadwinner following the death of my husband four years ago, leaving me to care for our three school-going children.”“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs” –Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga

“I now spend very little money buying food because crops from my small field here in the city supplement my food,” she added.

For others, like jobless 34-year-old Silveira Sinorita from Mozambique who now lives in the Zimbabwean town of Mutare, urban farming has become their job as they battle to feed their families.

“Without employment, I have found that farming here in town is an answer to my food woes at home because I grow my own potatoes, beans, vegetables and fresh maize cobs, whose surplus I then sell,” Sinorita told IPS.

Pushed to the edge by mounting food deficits, urban farmers in other African countries have even gone beyond mere crop farming. In cities such as Kampala in Uganda and Yaoundé in Cameroon, many urban households are raising livestock, including poultry, dairy cattle and pigs.

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa’s towns and cities at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 800 million people around the world practise urban agriculture and it has helped cushion them against rising food costs and insecurity, although the U.N. agency also warns that the number of hungry people has risen to over one billion globally, with the “urban poor being particularly vulnerable.”

However, urban farming in Africa is often met with opposition from the authorities where land is owned by local municipalities and agricultural experts say that opposing it makes no sense in the face of growing food insecurity.

“Poverty is not sparing even people living in the cities because jobs are getting scarce on the continent and as a result, farming in cities is fast becoming a common trend as people battle to supplement their foods, this despite urban farming being prohibited in towns and cities here,” government agricultural officer Norman Hwengwere told IPS. Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit farming on vacant municipal land.

FAO has also reported that Africa’s market gardens are the most threatened by the continent’s growth spurt because they are typically not regulated or supported by governments, and a recent study has called for governments to become more involved.

In a 2011 research study titled ‘Growing Potential: Africa’s Urban Farmers’, Anna Plyushteva, a PhD student at University College London, argues that greater government involvement is needed for urban agriculture to emerge out of marginality and illegality and deliver greater environmental and social benefits.

“Without official regulation, urban farming can create some serious problems. At present, informal farmers and their produce are exposed to contamination with organic and non-organic pollutants, which is a serious threat to public health,” said Plyushteva.

For independent Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga, the more people flock to cities, the more pressure they add to the limited resources there.

“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs,” Nakalonga told IPS.

“Often when people migrate from rural areas anywhere here in Africa, they cling to their agricultural heritage of practices through urban agriculture which you see many practising in towns today to evade hunger,” Nakalonga added.

In the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, for example, urban gardens in some communities resemble those found in the country’s rural areas from which people migrated.

Despite the opposition elsewhere, some African cities are nevertheless supporting the urban farming trend. The Cape Town local authority in South Africa, for example, introduced its first urban agriculture policy document in 2007, focusing on the importance of urban agriculture for poverty alleviation and job creation.

As FAO projects that there will be 35 million urban farmers in Africa by 2020, it is supporting programmes in some countries to capitalise on the benefits. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, FAO’s Urban Horticulture Programme is building on the skills of rural farmers who have come to the cities.

The FAO programme in DRC started in response to the country’s massive rural-to-urban exodus following a five-year conflict and now helps local urban farmers to produce 330,000 tons of vegetables each year, while providing employment and income for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners in the country’s towns and cities.

The country’s urban farmers sell 90 percent of what they produce in urban markets and supermarkets, according to FAO, helping to feed a swelling urban population as Congolese flee the countryside in search of security.

Meanwhile, in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, various groups and agencies have helped popularise the “vertical farm in a bag” concept in which city dwellers create their own gardens using tall sacks filled with soil from which plant life grows.

With hunger hitting both rural and urban African dwellers hard, an increasing number of them believe that urban farming is the way to go.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Customers enjoy a ‘Pay As You Feel Lunch’ at The Armley Junk-Tion, Armley, Leeds, where food destined to waste and intercepted by volunteers is cooked into perfectly edible and nutritious meals. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

By Silvia Boarini
LEEDS, England, Aug 31 2015 (IPS)

A new grassroots initiative born in the northern England city of Leeds has set itself the ambitious goal of ending food waste, once and for all.

Founded in December 2013, ‘The Real Junk Food Project’ (TRJFP), is the brainchild of chef Adam Smith.

It consists of a network of ‘Pay As You Feel’ cafés where food destined to waste and intercepted by volunteers is cooked into perfectly edible and nutritious meals that people can enjoy and give back what they can and wish, be it money, time or surplus food.

TRJFP is run on a volunteer basis through customers’, crowdfunding and private donations and with only a handful of paid positions at living wage level.

Sitting at a table in the first café opened by TRJFP, The Armley Junk-Tion in the struggling suburb of Armley, Leeds, 29-year-old Smith is still infectiously enthusiastic about it all.

Adam Smith, a chef from Leeds, northern England, who founded The Real Junk Food Project in December 2013. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

“It’s the right thing to do and it’s something that has a positive impact,” he told IPS. “We believe that we can empower people and communities and inspire change across the whole system through the organic growth of these cafés.”

In under two years, TRJFP has grown into a worldwide network of 110 cafés: 14 in Leeds, one of which in a primary school, 40 across the United Kingdom and the rest in countries as diverse as Germany, Australia, South Africa or France.

“So far,” explained Smith, “the Armley Junk-Tion alone has cooked 12,000 meals for 10,000 people using food that would otherwise have gone to landfill.” As a network, in 18 months it has fed 90,000 people 60,000 meals and saved 107,000 tonnes of food from needless destruction.

TRJFP volunteers are out every day and at all hours intercepting food from households, food businesses, allotments, food banks, wholesalers, supermarkets and supermarket bins.“The [U.K.] government is spending million and millions of pounds on campaigns to stop people from wasting food but all we are doing is just feeding it to people. We say, ‘if you know it’s safe to eat, why don’t you eat it?’ That’s all it takes, it didn’t cost us any money“ – Adam Smith, founder of ‘The Real Junk Food Project’

TRJFP has also been able to secure surplus chicken from the Nando’s restaurant chain and part of the food ”waste” generated by local Morrisons supermarket branches.

“We ignore expiry dates or damage and use our own judgment on whether we think the food is fit or safe for human consumption,” said Smith.

The number of tonnes of food intercepted, though, pales in comparison with the amount of food that is still wasted each year. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates food wastage globally at one-third of all food produced – that is 1.3 billion tonnes each year. This means that one in four calories produced is never consumed. On the other hand, FAO also reports that 795 million people worldwide are chronically undernourished.

‘Food waste’ is often described as a “scandal” and yet top-down actions seeking to put an end to it still treat the above statistics as two separate problems requiring two separate solutions – recycle more in rich countries and produce more food in and for developing countries – that effectively leave a faulty system intact and the interests of a multi-billion dollar industry unchallenged.

According to Tristram Stuart, campaigner and author of ‘Waste – Uncovering the Global Food Scandal’, “all the world’s nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.”  

But our short-sightedness and unwillingness to change our habits are laid bare in laws such as the one approved last May by the French parliament. In France, large supermarkets will be forbidden from throwing away unsold food and forced to give it to charity or farmers.

Although hailed as a breakthrough in the fight against food waste, critics such as food waste activists ‘Les Gars’pilleurs’ say that such laws only circle around the problem, offering a quick fix. For starters, supermarkets are hardly the only culprits. For example, as the U.K. charity Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) reports, they produce less than two percent of U.K. food waste, while private households are responsible for roughly 47 percent of it and producers 27 percent.

“The government is spending million and millions of pounds on campaigns to stop people from wasting food but all we are doing is just feeding it to people,” Smith cut short. “We say, ‘if you know it’s safe to eat, why don’t you eat it?’ That’s all it takes, it didn’t cost us any money.“

As a grassroots and independent initiative, TRJFP does not categorise food waste as an environmental, economic or social malaise. It tackles it holistically and works to educate the public but also lobbies ministers and parliamentarians to develop relevant policies.

“We have been to Westminster (seat of the U.K. parliament) a few times already to talk about this problem. There are many interests at stake but we will keep working until there is no more waste,” Smith said, adding that he hopes to prepare a waste-food lunch for members of parliament.

In Armley, the café fills up for lunch. On the menu are delicacies such as meat stew, steak and lentil soup. The clientele represents a cross-section of society that normally travels on parallel paths. Hipsters, homeless, professionals or unemployed all eat the same food, sit at the same tables and enjoy the same service. No referrals needed, no stigma attached, as often happens with other such services.

Richard, a recovering alcoholic, has been having lunch at The Armley Junk-Tion for a few months. “The café has been a real focus point for the community to come and eat together irrespective of background,” he told IPS. “It doesn’t matter what you want to eat. There’s always something on the menu for everybody.”

For 36-year-old Paul, with a history of mental illness, TRJFP offers an important safety net not guaranteed by social services. “Where I stay, my cooking facilities are restricted to a microwave. Due to cut backs and lack of support services, the only help I get is coming to places like this,” he told IPS.

Nigel Stone, one of the café’s volunteer co-directors, had no doubt the idea would catch on. “It is such an unbelievably common sense solution and the best part of it is how it brings the community together, especially in times of need.”

Slowly but steadily, TRJFP is changing norms around food waste and hopes to make it socially unacceptable for anyone to waste food. First off, though, they are proving that we must stop calling it waste, it just isn’t, it’s perfectly good food that every day we decide to throw away.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

SDGs - Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. A man walks through agricultural land in the village of Mirusuvil, in the northern Jaffna District. Over 122,000 persons have been severely impacted by the drought according to the latest government data. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
LONDON, Aug 13 2015 (IPS)

After 15 years of trying to meet the targets set out to address extreme poverty, the 193 member states of the United Nations have almost reached consensus on a more broad-reaching group of goals.

The only thing left to do is to sign off on the Sustainable Development Goals this fall in New York, when the countries get together for the annual General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters. Seven months of negotiations have produced a document: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Despite uneven progress on the eight MDGs, the new SDGs comprise 17 goals, with 169 targets. World leaders will set out in New York their visions for achieving these targets, which are hoped to provide a framework to combat poverty, climate change, inequality and hunger.

Sipian Lesan, a semi-nomadic pastoralist from Lekuru village in Samburu County, Kenya, taking care of one of his edible fruit-producing plants. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
SAMBURU, Kenya, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

Sipian Lesan bends to attend to the Vangueria infausta or African medlar plant that he planted almost two years ago. He takes great care not to damage the soft, velvety, acorn-shaped buds of this hardy and drought-resistant plant. ”All over here it is dry,” says the 51-year-old Samburu semi-nomadic pastoralist.

“We hope that every manyatta [homestead] will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest" – Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest
Sipian is from Lekuru, a remote village located in the lower ranges of the Samburu Hills, an area dotted by Samburu homesteads commonly known as ‘manyattas’, some 358 km north of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. Here, the small villages are hot and arid, dominated by thorny acacia and patches of bare red earth that signify overgrazed land.

Samburu County is one of the regions in Kenya ravaged by recurrent drought, with most of the population living below the poverty line.

Climate change has made pastoralism an increasingly unsustainable livelihood option, leaving many households in Samburu without access to a daily meal, let alone a balanced diet.

“Animals have and will continue to die due to severe drought,” said Joshua Leparashau, a Samburu community leader. “The community still wants to hold on to the concept that having many livestock is a source of pride. This must change. If we as a community do not become proactive in curbing the menace, then we must be prepared for nature to destroy us without any mercy.”

As he looks after his fruit-producing sapling, Sipian tells IPS that some decades ago, before people he calls “greedy” started felling trees to satisfy the growing demand for indigenous forest products, his community used to feed on their readily available wild fruits during extreme hunger.

Now, through a concept new to them – dubbed food or garden forest, and brought to Kenya by Israeli environmentalist Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest, an organisation dedicated to ecological revival and sustainable living work – the locals here are adopting planting of trees and shrubs that are favourable to the harsh local weather in their manyattas.

Community tree-planting in semi-arid Samburu County, Kenya. Robert Kibet/IPS

On a voluntary mission to help alleviate the degraded land and food insecurity in this part of northern Kenya, Rozin said that his vision would be to see at least each manyatta owning a food forest.

“The rate at which the community is embracing the concept is positive,” he said. “We hope that every manyatta will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest.”

However, the work of Sadhana Forest is not limited to forestation, as 35-year-old Resinoi Ewapere, who has eight children, explained.

“I used to leave early in the morning in search of water and return after noon. My children frequently missed school owing to the shortage of water and food.” But this daily routine came to an end after Sadhana Forest drilled a borehole from which water is now pumped using green energy – a combined windmill and solar energy system.

“Apart from the training we receive on planting fruit-producing trees and practising low-cost permaculture farming, we currently receive water from this centre at no cost,” Ewapere told IPS.

According to Rozin, Sadhana Forest’s initiative to help the Samburu community plant the 18 species of indigenous fruit trees which are drought-resistant and rich in nutrients is also part of a major conservation effort in that the combination of “small-scale food security and conservation of indigenous trees. will also create a linkage between people and trees and they will protect them.”

“We produce the seedlings and then supply them to the locals at no charge for them to plant in their manyattas,” said Rozin. Then, with careful management of the land and water-harvesting structures (swales or ditches dug on contours), water is fed directly into the plants.

The quality of the soil on the swales is improved by planting nitrogen-fixing plants such as beans, while the soil is watered and covered with mulch to prevent evaporation, thus remaining fertile.

One of the tree species being planted to create the food forests is Afzelia africana or African oak, the fruits of which are said to be rich in proteins and iron.  Its seed flour is used for baking. Another species is Moringa stenopetala, known locally as ‘mother’s helper’ because its fruit helps increase milk in lactating mothers and reduces malnutrition among infants.

“Residents here understand that their semi-nomadic life has to be slightly adjusted for survival,” noted George Obondo, coordinator of the NGO Coordination Board, who played a role in ensuring that Sadhana received 50,000 dollars from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) to jump start its Samburu project.

The money was used to set up a training centre with over 35 volunteers from various countries, including Haiti, to train locals and at the same time produce seedlings, and to build the green energy system for pumping water from the borehole it drilled.

“Things are changing,” said Obondo, “and Samburus know that their lifestyle needs to be altered and also tied to greater dependence on plant growing and not just livestock.” This is why the Sadhana Forest initiative is important, he added, because it is training people and giving them the knowledge and ability to create the resilience that they will need to avoid a harsh future.

Edited by Phil Harris

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

With the enthusiasm of the recent Financing for Development conference behind us, the central issues and many layers of what is at stake are now firmly in sight. In fact, a complex issue like hunger, which is a long standing development priority, remains an everyday battle for almost 795 million people worldwide.

Courtesy of Paloma Duran, Director of the Sustainable Development Goals Fund.

While this figure is 216 million less than in 1990-92, according to U.N. statistics, hunger kills more people every year than malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis combined. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment and is measured by the country average of how many calories each person has access to every day, as well as the prevalence of underweight children younger than five.

So where do we stand if food security and nutrition is destined to be a critical component of poverty eradication and sustainable development. In fact, the right to food is a basic human right and linked to the second goal of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs) which includes a target to end hunger and achieve food security by 2030.

The United Nations Development Programme is engaged in promoting sustainable agricultural practices to improve the lives of millions of farmers through its Green Commodities Programme. According to the World Food Programme, the world needs a food system that will meet the needs of an additional 2.5 billion people who will populate the Earth in 2050.

To eradicate hunger and extreme poverty will require an additional 267 billion dollars annually over the next 15 years. Given this looming prospect, a question that springs to mind is: how will this to be achieved?

Going forward, this goal requires more than words, it requires collective actions, including efforts to double global food production, reduce waste and experiment with food alternatives. As part of the Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) mission, we are working to understand how best to tackle this multi-faceted issue.

With the realisation that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to improve food security, the SDG Fund coordinates with a range of public and private stakeholders as well as U.N. Agencies to pilot innovative joint programmes in the field.

For example, the SDG Fund works to tackle food security and nutrition in Bolivia and El Salvador where rural residents are benefiting from our work to strengthen local farm production systems. In addition, we engage women and smallholder farmers as part of our cross-cutting efforts to build more integrated response to development challenges. We recognise that several factors must also play a critical role in achieving the hunger target, namely:

Improved agricultural productivity, especially by small and family farmers, helps improve food security;

Inclusive economic growth leads to important gains in hunger and poverty reduction;

the expansion of social protection contributes directly to the reduction of hunger and malnutrition.

In the fight against hunger, we need to create food systems that offer better nutritional outcomes and ones that are fundamentally more sustainable – i.e. that require less land, less water and that are more resilient to climate change.

The challenges are almost as great as the growing population which will require 70 percent more food to meet the estimated change in demand and diets. Notwithstanding is if we continue to waste a third of what we produce, we have to reevaluate agriculture and food production in terms of the supply chain and try to improve the quality and nutritional aspects across the value chain.

Food security and nutrition must be everyone’s concern especially if we are to eradicate hunger and combat food insecurity across all its dimensions. Feeding the world’s growing population must therefore be a joint effort and unlikely to be achieved by governments and international organisations alone.

In the words of José Graziano da Silva, FAO Director General, “The near-achievement of the MDG hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our lifetime. We must be the Zero Hunger generation. That goal should be mainstreamed into all policy interventions and at the heart of the new sustainable development agenda to be established this year.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Jul 20 2015 (IPS)

By the end of this year, the 15-year time frame for the Millennium Development Goals will end, with good progress on several indicators, but limited achievements on others.

But public interest has already moved on to the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.Recent experience has amply demonstrated that investment and growth alone cannot eliminate hunger and poverty by 2030.

Despite uneven success with the MDGs, the level of ambition has risen, with SDG1 seeking to eradicate poverty and SDG2 to eliminate hunger and malnutrition, all by 2030. Last week, the Addis Ababa Action Accord began with: “Our goal is to end poverty and hunger.”

Almost four-fifths of the world’s poor live in rural areas, which have less than half the world’s population. Hence, raising rural incomes sustainably is necessary to achieve the first two SDGs.

Ending poverty and hunger sustainably will need a combination of social protection and ‘pro-poor’ investments.

As food costs 50 to 70 percent of the World Bank’s poverty line income, poverty and hunger are intimately inter-related, although poverty and hunger measurement generates different numbers.

Agricultural investments generally have the biggest impact on reducing poverty, all the more so, if pro-poor, as well as designed and implemented well. Yet, while farmers themselves are the major source of agricultural investments, most formal financial institutions discriminate against them, especially smallholder family farmers, landless tenants and labourers, with little bankable collateral to offer.

Recent experience has amply demonstrated that investment and growth alone cannot eliminate hunger and poverty by 2030. Most developing countries have long suffered high unemployment and underemployment, with youth unemployment growing rapidly. With current economic prospects uncertain, especially after the recent slowing of the world economy, and widespread insistence on fiscal austerity and economic liberalisation, things are likely to get worse.

With sufficient political will and fiscal resources, poverty and hunger can be ended very quickly with adequate, well-designed and sufficient social protection, in fact, well before 2030. (This is why the G77 group of developing countries insisted last week on strengthening the U.N. committee on international tax cooperation — surely of interest to most developed countries as well.)

The world can currently produce enough food to feed everyone, but most of the hungry simply do not have the means to access enough food.

Social protection can not only ensure adequate food consumption, but also enable investments by those assisted to enhance their nutrition, health and other productive capacities, thus raising their incomes and, in turn, further increasing investments to expedite the transition from the vicious cycle of poverty and hunger, in which they have been trapped, to a more virtuous cycle free of want.

According to a recent World Bank report, a billion people in 146 low (LICs) and middle income countries (MICs) currently get some form of social protection. Yet, 870 million of the world’s extreme poor – most recently estimated at 836 million for 2015 – remained uncovered, mainly in the countryside. Not surprisingly, the greatest shortfalls are in the LICs.

In the LICs, 47 percent of the population are the extreme poor, with social protection covering less than a tenth of the population. In the lower MICs, social protection reaches about a quarter of the extreme poor, but half a billion remain uncovered. In the upper MICs, about 45 percent of the extreme poor is covered by social protection.

Last week, the Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and his counterparts from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP), presented their new estimates on investments for sustainable hunger and poverty eradication by 2030.

While some may quibble over details, they made the compelling case that ending hunger and poverty in a sustainable way is eminently viable, feasible and affordable, costing about 0.3 per cent of world economic output in 2014. Most MICs can afford the needed financing, but most LICs face serious fiscal constraints and will need budgetary support and technical assistance.

Enough social protection could end hunger and poverty very quickly, but it is not sustainable without higher earned incomes for those of the extreme poor able to work. An early big investment push will reduce longer term financing costs besides providing a much needed boost to aggregate demand in the face of the world economy’s ongoing economic doldrums.

The joint proposal by the Rome-based U.N. agencies not only shows that with the requisite political commitment, we can end hunger and poverty very quickly while creating the conditions for keeping both permanently in the catacombs of history.

Despite the poor compromise in Addis Ababa, quick real progress to enhance countries’ fiscal capacities through more effective international tax cooperation under U.N. auspices can be the third Financing for Development conference’s biggest contribution to this effort.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Zambian farmer Neva Hamalengo (right) knows what it means to lose crops to the ravages of weather and have no insurance coverage. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
MOYO, Pemba District, Zambia, Jul 6 2015 (IPS)

In the advent of unpredictable weather, smallholder rain-dependent agriculture is increasingly becoming a risky business and the situation could worsen if, as seems likely, the world experiences levels of global warming that could lead to an increase in droughts, floods and diseases, both in frequency and intensity.

Neva Hamalengo, a 40-year-old farmer from Moyo in Pemba district, Southern Zambia, knows what it means to lose everything in a blink of an eye – not only did a storm wipe out an entire hectare of market-ready tomatoes worth about 15,000 kwacha (2,000 dollars), but he also suffered maize crop failure due to a month-long drought.

“I expect very poor yields this season,” he told IPS. “We suffered crop damage through a storm and when crops needed the rains to recover, we had a severe drought.”

To make matters worse, his smallholder business had no insurance cover and, admitting that he “knew nothing about insurance,” Hamalengo said that would love to see insurance education incorporated into agricultural extension services.“When small-scale farmers are financially literate, they are able to guide fellow farmers to uptake a particular financial product such as insurance or credit … and avoid making poor decisions” – Allan Mulando, WFP Zambia

Hamalengo’s situation represents the predicament faced by most smallholder farmers – who are generally excluded from financial services – and confirms arguments by some experts that the risk of running an uninsured business is far greater if climate is involved.

While financial inclusion is considered a key enabler for reducing poverty, the statistics in Zambia are far from encouraging. According to a 2009 FinScope survey, 63 percent of the Zambian adult population (6.4 million people) is excluded from formal financial services. Slightly over half of the adult population is engaged in farming.

Putting these statistics into context, the “unbanked” majority are poor people, with many of them smallholder farmers. Now, in an attempt to help them become more resilient to climate variability and shocks, the World Food Programme (WFP) has launched the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, aimed at tackling risk in a holistic manner.

The initiative is “an integrated approach to managing risk, focusing on index‐based agricultural insurance (risk transfer), improved natural resource management (disaster risk reduction), credit (prudent risk taking), savings (risk reserves) and productive safety nets,” Allan Mulando, WFP Zambia’s Head of Vulnerability Assessment and Mapping Unit (VAM), told IPS.

The initiative is based on a strategic global partnership between WFP and Oxfam America which, Mulando said, is aimed at “improving the capacity of food-insecure households to manage the risks of severe weather shocks.”

Working with partners such as the national Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), government ministries, the Meteorological Department, national insurance companies, as well as credit and savings institutions, the project strives to integrate activities with already running government programmes on resilience, such as the Conservation Agriculture Scaling Up (CASU), programme.

CASU, which is being run by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and with financial support from the European Union (EU), aims to contribute to reduced hunger, and improved food security, nutrition and income, while promoting the sustainable use of natural resources.

“R4’s overall objective is to create an environment for private sector participation through market development to ensure sustainability … through insurance cover, credit provision, asset creation programmes and safety nets, as well as household saving … all of which have been identified as alternative ways of reducing vulnerability,” explained Mulando.

Stressing the importance of the project, Southern Province Principal Agriculture Officer Paul Nyambe told IPS that “the Ministry [of Agriculture and Livestock] has been encouraging climate-resilient technologies under CASU and crop diversification amid climate-induced hazards, of which financial inclusion is a key ingredient.”

Meanwhile, for the Ministry of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, such initiatives are always welcome because they fall within the government’s major objective of building the capacity of local communities to adapt to climate change.

“Stakeholders with initiatives that help people to adapt are welcome,” Richard Lungu, Chief Environment Management Officer at the ministry, said. “Right now, government is in the process of mobilising resources to support communities affected by a severe drought which led to crop failure.”

According to Lungu, who is Zambia’s focal point for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) , “climate change is now a cross-cutting developmental issue especially for Zambia whose economy is natural resource dependent”, with over 80 percent of the population dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Whereas climate shocks can trap farmers in poverty, the risk of shocks also limits their willingness to invest in measures that might increase their productivity and improve their economic situation – and this is where financial education becomes critical.

“Taking into consideration that agricultural weather-based index insurance is relatively new among our small farmers, there is a need for strong financial education,” Mulando told IPS. “When small-scale farmers are financially literate, they are able to guide fellow farmers to uptake a particular financial product such as insurance or credit … and avoid making poor decisions.”

Financial expert George Siameja agreed but noted that the problem lies at two levels – lack of financial education and an inhibiting credit finance environment.

“However, financial literacy should be the starting point because banks consider it too risky to lend money to individuals with inadequate financial capacity,” Siameja told IPS. “While farming is a function of climate, financial education is key.”

Sussane Giese, a German development and change consultant, also pointed to the so-called “dependency syndrome” which inhibits farmers from being more active. “In my interactions with some field officers,” she said, “there is something called dependency syndrome affecting farmers where they see themselves as beneficiaries and not individuals running agriculture as an enterprise.”

Meanwhile, one farmer who is singing the praises of financial literacy is 34-year-old Rodney Mudenda of Nabuzoka village in Pemba district, who has seen a dramatic change of fortunes.

“Since I was trained in financial management last year, I have changed my approach to farming. I am ready to take calculated risks like I did this season to reduce on maize and plant more sunflowers, a drought-tolerant crop. And the gamble has paid off. I expect to earn 12,000 kwacha (1,500 dollars) from an investment of 5,000 kwacha (650 dollars)”, Mudenda told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris

With a network of 60,000 ration shops, India’s public food distribution system is mired in corruption and inefficiency, leaving millions starving while tonnes of grain rot in storage. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jul 1 2015 (IPS)

Chottey Lal, 43, a daily wage labourer at a construction site in NOIDA, a township in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is a beleaguered man. After a gruelling 12-hour daily shift at the dusty location, he and his wife Subha make barely enough to feed a family of seven.

Nor is the couple ever able to procure the subsidized rations they are legally entitled to, under a government law, from their local fair price shop.

"I usually disappear at meal times from home, as it’s heart-wrenching to see so many people parcel out so little food among themselves. I now beg for food, though I live with my sons." -- Savirti, a 50-year-old woman who is cut off from India's public food distribution system
“Whenever we go to the outlet, we’re shooed away by the grocer saying stocks have run out. We end up buying expensive food from the market, which isn’t enough to feed the entire family. Everybody knows the shopkeeper is profiteering from selling grain on the black market. But what can we, the poor, do? We’ve complained at the local police station also, but no action has been taken against the vendor,” Lal told IPS.

Savirti, 50, and Kamla, 39, have a worse tale to share.

Both women, who are widows and live with their married sons, are dependent on their families for food and a roof over their heads. However, they have been reduced to beggary as the family income is meagre and the grain rations they receive from the fair price shops are barely enough to feed half the family.

“I usually disappear at meal times from home, as it’s heart-wrenching to see so many people parcel out so little food among themselves. I now beg for food, though I live with my sons,” Savitri told IPS.

Kamla similarly feels she “eats better outside the home than inside” due to strangers’ kindness.

Engulfed in corruption, leakages and inefficiency, India’s public food distribution system (PDS) – a network of about 60,000 fair price shops around this country of 1.2 billion people – is depriving millions of poor people of the food grain they are entitled to under the National Food Security Act (NFSA).

Essential commodities like rice, wheat, sugar, and kerosene are supposed to be supplied to the public through this network at a fraction of the market rates.

The NFSA aims to sustain two-thirds of the country’s population by providing 35 kg of subsidised food grains per person per month at one to three rupees (0.01 to 0.04 dollars) per kilo.

However, only 11 states and Union Territories (UTs) have so far implemented the law, which was passed by Parliament in September 2013. The rest of the 25 states or UTs have not implemented it yet.

To make matters worse, national surveys have highlighted how millions of tonnes of grain are siphoned off from the distribution system by unscrupulous merchants.

They sell this loot in the open market at high profits, or export it in collusion with corrupt officials from the state-run Food Corporation of India. Much of the food from the PDS is also diverted to neighbouring countries like Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh and Singapore.

A government study done in Uttar Pradesh found that numerous, competing agencies, poor coordination and low administrative accountability have combined to cripple the delivery mechanism.

The Justice D. P. Wadhwa Committee, which was tasked by the Supreme Court of India with monitoring its orders in a public interest litigation case on the right to food in 2006, recently came out with a damning indictment of the PDS.

Investigating irregularities in the chain’s distribution, the committee revealed that 80 percent of the corruption in distribution happens even before supplies reach the ration shops.

Worse, nearly 60 percent of the food that is channeled through the public distribution system is either wasted or siphoned off in transit. “What reaches the poor beneficiaries is often not even fit for consumption,” explains food expert Devinder Sharma who helms the New Delhi-based collective, Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.

Malnourished kids run around outside a ration shop in India. The lettering on the side of the building is part of an advertisement by a multinational telecom company, peddling cheap phones in the country that hosts the world’s largest population of hungry people. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

This rampant and systemic abuse in the delivery chain augurs ill for a country like India, home to 194.6 million undernourished people, the highest in the world, according to the recent annual report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

The report states that the numbers translate as over 15 percent of the country’s population, exceeding China in both absolute numbers and the proportion of malnourished people in the country.

“Higher economic growth has not been fully translated into higher food consumption, let alone better diets overall, suggesting that the poor and hungry may have failed to benefit much from overall growth,” says the 2015 State of Food Insecurity in the World about India.

Close to 1.3 million children die every year in India because of malnutrition, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world, and is nearly double that of sub-Saharan Africa, with dire consequences for mobility, mortality, productivity and economic growth, states the WHO.

In a bid to tackle the problem of chronic hunger, the Shanta Kumar Committee, tasked with a review of the PDS in India, submitted a report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year, recommending a gradual phasing out of the PDS and a move to cash transfers.

The proposed cash transfer, according to the committee, will whittle down poor beneficiaries’ reliance on PDS ration shops. Some experts have buttressed this idea with the argument that dismantling the food procurement system, by providing coupons or food entitlements in the form of cash to the beneficiaries and allowing them to buy their own quota from the market, is a far more foolproof system.

The belief is that if the people are given the subsidy directly, both the government and the consumers will benefit.

Each year India’s granaries burst with bumper harvests of wheat and rice, but the grain is either pilfered by middlemen or allowed to rot in the rain while millions starve.

The government also incurs a huge expenditure on the food grains it supplies through the system. The leakage of food grains supplied to the PDS is as high as 48 percent, say surveys, and the buffer stocks it maintains are often far above the requirement, leading to huge costs on maintenance.

Ironically, the PDS is one of the largest programmes in India aimed at social welfare of the poor. Renowned economist Jean Drèze has argued that the impact on poverty reduction can be considerable if the PDS works efficiently.

Currently, close to 23 percent of India’s people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day – an arbitrary line that the Asian Development recently found to be an inadequate measure of poverty, suggesting that a line of 1.51 dollars would better reflect the sum required to keep a person at a minimum standard of existence.

Regardless of how extreme poverty is measured, it is clear that millions in this country are at, or very close, to, the point of starvation every single day.

Experts like Dr. Ravi Khetrapal, an agricultural scientist formerly with the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies, believe the PDS to be an essential component of Indian society because the prevailing market prices for essential commodities are beyond the reach of the downtrodden.

“If the poor don’t access this network, they will starve to death,” he told IPS. “The network can play a more meaningful role if it is streamlined to ensure micro-level success and availability of food grains for all poor households.”

India has an impressive list of programmes to fight hunger, and the budget allocation for these is increased every year, and yet the poor go hungry. In fact, according to U.N. data, the number of impoverished people in the country is increasing with every passing year.

The answer does not lie in dismantling the PDS system, but reforming the world’s largest food delivery system to cleanse it of corruption, and make it more effective.

“This is certainly possible, but given the extent of political meddling – from the allotment of ration shops to transportation of grains – it has never been attempted in earnest. We need to build a system that ensures food for all at all times. This is what constitutes inclusive growth. A hungry population is a great economic loss,” Sharma told IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Dja Abdullah, just one victim of the gathering pace of climate change fuelled by coal-fired power stations, has walked 300 km with his cattle in search of fresh pasture in the Sahel region of Mauritania. Credit: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam

By Sean Buchanan
LONDON, Jun 6 2015 (IPS)

As heads of state and government of the G7 states prepare for their Jun. 7-8 summit in Germany, Oxfam has released a new report titled Let Them Eat Coal which they may find hard to digest.

According to the report, coal plants in the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and United States – are on track to cost the world 450 billion dollars a year by the end of the century and reduce crops by millions of tonnes as they fuel the gathering pace of climate change.“Coal-fired power stations … increasingly look like weapons of destruction aimed at those who suffer the impacts of changing rainfall patterns as well as of extreme weather events” – Professor Olivier de Schutter, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

Launching the report, which has been endorsed by business leaders, academics and climate experts, Oxfam warns that coal is the biggest driver of climate change, which is already hitting the world’s poorest people hardest and making the fight to end hunger tougher.

Noting that the G7 countries remain major consumers of coal, Oxfam is calling on the G7 leaders meeting in Germany to shift from coal to renewable energy sources which offer a safer and cost effective alternative and the prospect of millions of new jobs around the world.

This, it says, would also be a giant step towards those countries not only meeting current emissions targets but moving closer to what is urgently needed.

The international agency reports that Africa, for example, faces costs of 84 billion a year by the end of the century due to the damage caused by G7 coal emissions. This is 60 times the amount Africa currently receives from the G7 in aid to support agriculture and food production.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that Africa’s food production systems are highly vulnerable to climate change, with declines likely in cereal crops across the continent of up to 35 percent by mid-century. Oxfam warns that seven million tonnes of staple crops could be lost annually by the 2080s because of G7 coal emissions.

Celine Charveriat, Oxfam International’s Director of Advocacy and Campaigns, said: “The G7 leaders must stop using emissions growth in developing countries as an excuse for inaction and begin leading the world away from fossil fuels by starting with their own addiction to coal.

“The G7’s coal habit is racking up costs for Africa and other developing regions. It’s time G7 leaders woke up to the hunger their own energy systems are causing to the world’s poorest people on the frontline of climate change.

Referring to the U.N. Climate Change Conference scheduled for December in Paris, Charveriat said: “Ahead of a new climate deal due to be struck at the end of this year, G7 leaders can give the global fight against climate change the momentum it needs by shifting away from coal. This will make significant additional cuts in their emissions, create jobs and be a major step towards a safer, sustainable and prosperous future for us all.”

Globally, coal is responsible for almost three-quarters (72 percent) of power sector emissions, and while more than half of today’s coal consumption is in developing countries, the scale of G7 coal burning is considerable – if G7 coal plants were a country, noted Oxfam, it would be the fifth biggest emitter in the world.

G7 coal plants emit double the fossil fuel emissions of Africa and ten times as much as the 48 least developed countries.

At the 2009 Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen, all countries agreed to prevent warming of more than 2°C to avoid runaway climate change. Since then, said Oxfam, five of the G7 countries – France, Germany, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom – have been burning more coal, and the world is now heading for an increase in global warming by 4°C.

Climate experts, business leaders and development specialists who are backing the Let Them Eat Coal report include Professor Olivier de Schutter (former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food), Nick Molho (Chief Executive of the Aldersgate Group of business, political and civil society leaders), Sharon Burrow (General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation) and Dessima Williams (former Ambassador of Grenada to the United Nations and former Chair of the Alliance of Small Island Developing States).

According to de Schutter, “climate disruptions are already affecting many poor communities in the global South, and coal-fired power stations are contributing, every day, to make this worse. They increasingly look like weapons of destruction aimed at those who suffer the impacts of changing rainfall patterns as well as of extreme weather events.”

Oxfam says that the G7 countries must lead the way because they are most responsible for climate change, and because they have the most resources to decarbonise their economies and fund both emissions cuts and adaptation so that developing countries can protect themselves from climate change and develop in a low-carbon way.

Oxfam is also calling on the G7 to stand by existing commitments to jointly mobilise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020, and to make visible progress in both raising public finance over the next five years and increasing the proportion of funding for adaptation to climate change.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Siduduzile Nyoni, a mother of three, busily completing one of her ilala palm products, which will be sold through a women’s cooperative in western Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
LUPANE, Zimbabwe, Jun 3 2015 (IPS)

Seventy-seven-year-old Grace Ngwenya has an eye for detail. You will never catch her squinting as she effortlessly weaves ilala palm fronds into beautiful baskets.

“Working together as women has united us, and strengthened our community spirit.” -- Lisina Moyo, a member of the Lupane Women's Centre (LWC)
Her actions are swift and methodical as she twirls, straightens and tugs the long strands into a fine stitch. Periodically she pauses to dip the last three fingers of her right hand into a shallow tin of water that sits beside her, to wet the fibres and make them pliable.

Slowly, under the deft motion of her hands, a basket takes shape. She insists on attention to “detail, neatness and creativity.” Once she has decided on the shape and colour of her product, she will work for seven days straight to complete the task.

When she’s done, the basket will be inspected for quality, carefully packed up, and shipped off to its buyer who could be anywhere in the world from Germany to the United States. Her efforts earn her about 50 dollars a month – a small fortune in a place where women once counted it a blessing to earn even a few dollars in the course of several weeks.

Ngwenya lives in Shabula village in Ward 15 of Zimbabwe’s arid Lupane District, located in the Matabeleland North Province that occupies the western-most region of the country, 170 km from the nearest city of Bulawayo.

Home to about 90,000 people, this area is prone to droughts and has a harsh history of hunger.

Today, rural women are putting Lupane District on the map with an innovative basket-weaving enterprise that is earning them a decent wage, preserving an indigenous skill and enabling them to erect a barrier against extreme weather events by investing the profits of their creativity into sustainable farming.

Perfecting skills, preserving arts

It started small, when a group of women came together in 1997 to produce baskets and other crafts from local forest products and sell them along the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls road, a major tourist route.

In 2004, with the help of a Peace Corp volunteer, they establised the Lupane Women’s Centre (LWC) in order to streamline their production. At the time they had just 14 registered members.

A decade later they have grown their ranks to 3,638 members hailing from 28 wards in the district. Average earnings have increased from one dollar to 50 dollars a month, and this past May one of their number earned 700 dollars from the sale of her crafts.

For a community that was barely able to put three square meals on the table every day, this is a huge step towards a more wholesome life.

“Weaving has transformed my life, even in my old age,” Ngwenya tells IPS, pointing to a half-built residence not far from where she sits, busily threading away. In this impoverished village, the emerging two-roomed brick house is a veritable super-structure.

Grace Ngwenya, a skilled weaver from Zimbabwe’s Lupane District, deftly threads palm strands into a sturdy basket. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“This year sales have been slow,” she says, “but God willing, my house should be complete by next year. I have already bought the windows and I will plaster and paint it myself.”

In addition to a dwelling place, her income has helped her buy a goat and erect a fence around her ‘keyhole’ garden, a popular farming method all across the African continent involving a keyhole-shaped vegetable bed with an active compost pile at its centre that feeds crops in the walled-in plot.

At a weaving competition last year she even won an ox-drawn plough and recently sunk more of her savings into the purchase of a heifer and some simple farm tools.

Considering that she joined the collective during a drought year back in 2008, she is forever grateful for her newfound wellbeing. And it is not just her own life that has changed.

Barely a stone’s throw away is the homestead of her sister Gladys, and her husband, Misheck Ngwenya. This cluster of huts is distinguished by solar lights attached to their thatched roofs, a luxury secured with the boons of Gladys’ basket sales.

“In the past I would go to my neighbours to ask for sugar,” Gladys Ngwenya recalls. “Not anymore.”

She tells IPS the women’s centre has helped her perfect her art by improving the dimensions and measurements of her craft work.

Beating hunger with baskets

It is no coincidence that these entrepreneurs sprang from the dry soil of Lupane District. The area is a farmer’s nightmare, yielding only drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum and finger millet and receiving inadequate rainfall – just 450-600 mm annually – to allow extensive maize cropping.

When the weather is bad, with long, dry spells, rural communities suffer badly.

Statistics from the Department of Agriculture and Extension Services indicate that Lupane experiences annual food shortages. In 2008, it had a food production deficit of more than 10,000 metric tonnes of grain, producing just over 3,000 tonnes of cereal against an estimated annual requirement of 13,900 metric tonnes.

The situation has not changed seven years later. In 2015, scores of people are at risk of hunger, with government data suggesting that only half of the region’s required 10,900 metric tonnes will be produced this year.

Families who practice subsistence agriculture will be forced to purchase food to make up for lower harvests, a situation that could leave many with no food at all given that income-generating opportunities are scarce.

Zimbabwe is this year importing 700,000 tonnes of the staple maize grain to cover a deficit following another bad agricultural season. The country requires 1.8 million tonnes of maize annually.

The Women’s Centre in Lupane is now tackling these twin problems – hunger and livelihoods – by helping craftswomen become breadwinners.

Hildegard Mufukare, who manages the Centre, tells IPS that putting women at the head of the household has created “peace in the home.”

“Women have bought assets from farm implements to cattle, they have taken up agricultural activities and are working together with the men to sustain their families.”

Applying a communal, grassroots approach to its management and upkeep, members contribute five dollars annually towards operational costs, accounting for 31 percent of the Centre’s required financing.

The remaining 59 percent comes from donors, including patron backers like the Liechtenstein Development Services (LED), but members say they plan to cultivate greater self-sufficiency by establishing and running a restaurant, conference centre and farm which will serve the dual purpose of providing more food and skills to the community.

As they grow their markets overseas, securing additional funding will not be difficult. Already members courier their wares to clients in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and Denmark.

Revenue from craft sales tripled over a two-year period, going from 10,000 dollars in 2012 to 32,000 dollars in 2014. The members keep the bulk of the profits while the Centre retains 15 percent to cover administration fees and government taxes.

The baskets are multi-functional, doubling up as waste bins or fruit bowls. The women are now toying with the idea of turning them into biodegradable coffins – to ensure sustainability even in their deaths.

Members of the Lupane Women’s Centre hope to market these ‘eco coffins’, biodegradable caskets made from local materials, to ensure their community is sustainable, even in death. Credit: Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

They are unsure how such an idea will be received, but their bold proposal suggests a commitment to holistic living that goes beyond incomes or nutrition.

Preparing for a changing climate

Community-led buffers against the horrors of global warming are desperately needed in Zimbabwe, a country of 14.5 million that faces a host of climate risks from floods to droughts.

Unable to access adequate international climate finance, the country was forced to slice its environment ministry’s budget from 93 million in 2014 to 52 million this year.

The funding crunch has crippled the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters, with the meteorological services department – responsible for forecasts and early warnings – also experiencing budget cuts.

This means that when calamity strikes, remote communities and especially rural women will be left to fend for themselves, a reality that the women of Lupane are more than prepared to deal with.

Siduduzile Nyoni, a mother of three who joined the cooperative in 2008, says that the simple act of weaving baskets has helped her build a lifeline for times of crisis.

She has used her savings to buy a goat, and is also maintaining a chicken farm and a thriving vegetable garden. When the weather is fine, the garden feeds her family. If it takes a turn for the worse, she simply dips into her surplus stores to tide her over until the land yields food again.

“I joined the centre even though I didn’t know how to weave,” she tells IPS. Her husband is unemployed, but she is doing well enough to support them both.

She and three other women have created their own micro-savings scheme, pooling five dollars of their monthly income into a rotational pool of 20 dollars that each enjoys on a quarterly basis.

Other groups of women have taken advantage of skills training at the Centre and taken up potato farming, bee keeping, candle making, and cattle rearing. Rearing indigenous chickens is also hugely popular activity as an additional source of revenue, and nutrition.

Women from Zimbabwe’s Lupane District invest the profits of their craft sales in ‘keyhole’ gardens to ensure food security. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Others have turned to small-scale farming so they don’t have to rely on central supply chains for their food. According to Lisina Moyo, who joined the Centre in 2012, keyhole gardens “should be a part of every home” – earning 15 dollars a month from her personal vegetable patch has helped her pay her children’s school fees and contribute to a savings club that keeps her afloat during harsh seasons.

Saving the forests

Perhaps more importantly, the thousands of women who comprise the cooperative’s membership are natural caretakers of forests, having practiced sustainable harvesting of forest products for years.

The art of basket-weaving from both ilala palm and sisal, a species of the Agave plant found in Zimbabwe’s forests whose tough fibres make strong rope and twine, has been passed down for generations.

Furthermore, local communities have traditionally relied on surrounding forests for medicines, timber, fuel and fruits, so they have a vested interest in protecting these rich zones of biodiversity.

Considering the country lost an estimated 327,000 hectares of forests annually between 1990 and 2010, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), empowering guardians of Zimbabwe’s remaining forested areas is crucial.

With an estimated 66,250 timber merchants operating throughout the country, as well as millions of rural families relying on forests for fuel, deforestation will be a defining issue for Zimbabwe in the coming decade.

But here again, the women of Lupane are planning for the worst, creating small plantations of ilala palms to ensure propagation of the species, even in the face of rapid destruction of its natural habitat.

Their work is reinforcing the land around them, and breathing life into the women themselves.

As Moyo tells IPS: “Working together as women has united us, and strengthened our community spirit.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

This article is part of a special series entitled ‘The Future Is Now: Inside the World’s Most Sustainable Communities’. Read the other articles in the series here.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, May 28 2015 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: Abdul Ghani Ismail

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2015 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates almost 795 million people—one in nine people worldwide—remain chronically hungry.

The number of undernourished people—those regularly unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life—in the world has thus only declined by slightly over a fifth from the 1010.6 million estimated for 1991 to 929.6 million in 2001, 820.7 million in 2011 and 794.6 million in 2014.

With the number of chronically hungry people in developing countries declining from 990.7 million in 1991 to 779.9 million in 2014, their share in developing countries has declined by 44.4 per cent, from 23.4 to 12.9 per cent over the 23 years, but still short of the 11.7 per cent target.

Thus, the MDG 1c target of halving the chronically undernourished’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 is unlikely to be met at the current rate of progress. However, meeting the target is still possible, with sufficient, immediate, additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress thus far.With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome by 2030 without universally establishing a social protection floor for all.

Progress uneven

Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 15 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases.

By the end of 2014, 72 of the 129 developing countries monitored had reached the MDG 1c target — to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the chronically undernourished under five per cent. Several more are likely to do so by the end of 2015.

Instead of halving the number of hungry in developing regions by 476 million, this number was only reduced by 221 million, just under half the earlier, more ambitious WFS goal. Nevertheless, some 29 countries succeeded in at least halving the number of hungry. This is significant as this shows that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

Marked differences in undernourishment persist across the regions. There have been significant reductions in both the share and number of undernourished in most countries in South-East Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean—where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached.

While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished. West Asia alone has seen an actual rise in the share of the hungry compared to 1991, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

Efforts need to be stepped up

Despite the shortfall in achieving the MDG1c target and the failure to get near the WFS goal of halving the number of hungry, world leaders are likely to commit to eliminating hunger and poverty by 2030 when they announce the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations in September.

To be sure, there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world. However, hundreds of millions of people do not have the means to access enough food to meet their dietary energy needs, let alone what is needed for diverse diets to avoid ‘hidden hunger’ by meeting their micronutrient requirements.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome by 2030 without universally establishing a social protection floor for all. Such efforts will also need to provide the means for sustainable livelihoods and resilience.

The Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome last November articulated commitments and proposals for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition. Improvements in nutrition will require sustained and integrated efforts involving complementary policies, including improving health conditions, food systems, social protection, hygiene, water supply and education.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Date palm trees abound in the Niyamgiri hills of the Indian state of Odisha. The fruits contain antioxidants and Vitamin A, and the sap is collected and fermented to produce liquor. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India, May 19 2015 (IPS)

Scattered across 240 sq km on the remote Niyamgiri hill range in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, an ancient tribal group known as the Dongria Kondh have earned themselves a reputation as trailblazers.

Having fought – and won – a decade-long battle with a British mining giant that invested close to a billion dollars in a bauxite extraction operation in this mineral-rich area, the Dongria Kondh set an example in 2013 to millions of tribal people around the world that David versus Goliath-style confrontations can still be won by the underdog.

Now, the indigenous group is once again at the forefront of a global problem – the twin issues of hunger and deforestation – as they continue to nurture an ancient way of life despite a wave of destructive development that is threatening their traditional and sustainable farming practices.

Here, a Dongria Kondh woman reaches for barada leaves, a vital source of iron for the community. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Numbering some 10,000 people, the Dongria Kondh believe the forests and hills to be sacred sites, and have for centuries lived in harmony with the land, with a single family harvesting an average of 130 kg of wild produce in a single year.

Their varied and nutritious diet, which includes over 25 species of plants, comes directly from the forests, while springs originating in the Niyamgiri hills provide fresh, clean water all year round.

But rampant deforestation for large-scale infrastructure projects, coupled with mono-culture plantations of fast-growing trees to supply timber and paper industries with raw materials, as well as mining activities, have reduced food availability for the Dongria Kondh and other indigenous groups by over 30 percent and increased their gathering time by 80 percent over the last 30 years.

Today, 55 percent of adults from the Dongria Kondh community are protein-energy deficient and 60 percent of school-aged children are malnourished.

The situation reflects a trend all across India, a country of 1.2 billion people, where some of the poorest and hungriest live in or around forests.

India is currently home to one-quarter of the 805 million malnourished people worldwide, as well as to a third of the world’s underweight children and nearly a third of all food-insecure people – most of them among the 275 million-strong forest-dwelling population of this vast country.

The irony of the fact that those living closest to readily available food sources are going hungry has not escaped the attention of policy-makers, with the United Nations spearheading efforts to protect forests due to their critical importance in alleviating hunger and mitigating the impacts of climate change, not just in India but worldwide.

With 1.6 billion people – including over 2,000 indigenous cultures – depending directly on forests for food, shelter, income and fuel, preserving these areas feeds directly into the U.N.’s sustainable development agenda, and could also play a role in the ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’, launched by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 in a bid to completely eradicate the scourge of malnutrition and food insecurity.

This is easier said than done, given that an estimated 13 million hectares of forests are destroyed annually, denying hundreds of thousands of people of their only source of food.

While this seems like a bleak trend, one need only look up at the Niyamgiri hills for a lesson on an alternative economic model, one based on community management and control of land and resources, rather than the rampant destruction of living ecosystems for profit.

Here in Odisha, the forest-food nexus meets the accumulated traditional knowledge of an ancient people, pointing the way to a horizon where hunger is a thing of the past, not the future.

A major reason for the Dongria Kondh’s opposition to Vedanta Resource’s bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Mountains in the eastern Indian state of Odisha was that it would destroy their numerous perennial hill streams. Here, a tribal girl washes at a pipe that gushes fresh water 24 hours a day. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Date palm trees abound in the Niyamgiri hills of the Indian state of Odisha. The fruits contain antioxidants and Vitamin A, and the sap is collected and fermented to produce liquor. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Tribal women collect fistfuls of ‘broom grass’ from the hill slopes of the Niyamgiri range in Odisha, India. Bundles tied together with hemp rope sell for 60 cents apiece in village markets, though urban traders get double the price. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Rich in protein, young bamboo shoots are a delicacy among the Dongria Kondh tribal community in eastern India. The outer skin is boiled with salt and chilli as a source of nutrition. During the monsoon season, when the shoots are plentiful, members of the tribe earn an income from bamboo. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The ‘barada’ leafy green is sweet, easy to digest and rich in iron. Here, a tribal woman sun-dries the leaves so they can be stored for up to two months. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Women shoulder the lion’s share of forest produce collection. A typical day’s haul includes tamarind, which fetches a large part of a household’s annual income, and wild yams, a dietary mainstay during the lean months of August to October. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The highly valued mahua flowers are collected, dried and made into liquor. Its seeds yield oil that can be used for cooking. Among some tribal groups mahua paste is used medicinally to facilitate childbirth. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Honey is the Dongria Kondh’s most precious forest product, valued for its nutrition, medicinal properties and high returns from sale. Because the tribe manages and protects large sections of the Niyamgiri hills in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, hundreds of wild honeybee colonies can still be found here. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Freshly fermented liquor made from the sap of the Salapa palm tree is often used during rituals. This is one of seven trees considered a ‘must’ in the Dongria Kondh’s sacred grove. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida