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	Developed nations should reform aid and launch a new Green Revolution by Marshall Bouton YaleGlobal   As the world still struggles to deal with the first truly global recession, little attention has been given to the growing number of hungry people and the possibility of mounting food crises in the years ahead. According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry. Stagnant agricultural productivity, rising food prices and now declining incomes, especially in much of Africa and parts of South Asia, have brought the world dangerously close to humanitarian distress and resulting social and political instability. Averting such a calamity must be high on the global agenda. The G8 meeting in L’Aquila, Italy on July 8-10 is the time to start.   Surprisingly, while our world may be increasingly urban, the world of the poor and hungry remains overwhelmingly rural. Of the 1.2 billion people in the world living on less than a dollar a day, the majority, almost 700 million, are small farmers, farm laborers and their families in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia who are unable to sustain themselves, not to mention rapidly growing urban populations, due to decades of lagging farm productivity.   Most of the world’s hungry people are women and children. Women comprise 80% of Africa’s farmers, but they have access to only 5% of the continent’s agricultural land, credit and extension services, a key reason for the region’s average grain yield being one-fifth that of the US and Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 55% of the global nutritional gap, with devastating impacts on children’s physical and mental development. Almost half of all children in South Asia, most of them on farms, are underweight for their age..   * Marshall Bouton is president of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Visit the link below to access the complete article. Visit the related web page
	Food security: Putting food on plates by Andrew Jarvis Chatham House   Looking back through the mists of the credit crunch to the world before Lehman Brothers went bust, it is a little too easy to forget that food prices were making the news. From the end of 2007 to the middle of last year, the world saw the largest increases in a generation. They pushed hundreds of millions of people further into poverty and hunger, fuelled social unrest in numerous countries, prompted new trade barriers, and propelled food security to the top of the global political agenda. Headline writers have moved on, but large parts of the world are still living with punitively high food prices. The consequences will affect health and livelihoods for decades. The real potential for future crisis remains.   Prices for food commodities in global markets have fallen back from their peaks. By this June, the Food and Agriculture Organisation"s main food price index stood at two thirds of its level a year earlier. This welcome turn-around has helped many people and relieved pressure on the balance of payments of some food-importing developing countries.   But the oft-quoted international market prices of wheat, maize and other commodities can give a misleading impression of the realities facing people across much of the developing world.   Country data shows local prices are not always following the global decline. Isolated by geography, poor infrastructure, uncompetitive markets and the like, many of those who would gain most have yet to see the benefits enjoyed by communities better connected to the arteries of global trade.   And food affordability has fallen further as the global economic downturn has hit household incomes. Higher prices are not the only driver of household food insecurity. Falls in incomes further reduce food affordability, putting a double squeeze on people.   The global economic slowdown has reduced growth rates in many developing countries. It has cut direct earnings from export industries and reduced remittance income. The World Bank forecasts that remittances to developing countries will fall by ten percent this year after several years of growth.   So while prices on the Chicago exchange may have reduced, hunger has not. The consequences of the current conditions for human nutrition are stark. United Nations data suggests one in six of the global population – more than one billion people – are seriously undernourished.   One year on, how much has been done to address the causes of the food price crisis and prevent a repetition of the events of 2007-2008? Many analysts linked those food price rises to a basket of factors that included:   A decline in global food stocks that left markets thinner and more volatile in the face of short-run supply interruptions – such as drought in Australia – and long run increases in demand for food grain, animal feed and biofuels.   High energy prices that pushed up the prices for fertiliser, transport and other food chain costs and which also had a "pull" effect through the linking of biofuel demand to the oil price.   At first sight, things have changed in a year. The oil price fell, before recovering to somewhere around $70. The recession has put a temporary brake on rising demand for grain and other foods; grain supply has increased.   But the underlying issues remain. The modern food system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and thus remains exposed to energy price shocks. And work has barely begun on the core challenge of building a more resilient and sustainable food supply.   Many farmers responded to price signals by increasing production. Global stocks of maize, rice and wheat have recovered from their 2006 lows, though total demand has risen since then too.   Markets look a little more resilient this year but the tight balance of supply and demand – and vulnerability to a spate of poor harvests – remains.   Last year demonstrated the fragilities of the food commodity trading system when under stress. Already restricted by tariffs and quotas, governments erected new trade barriers to discourage the export of domestic supplies.   These events, and a recognition that in a crisis governments will look first to protect domestic stability, even if their actions make global instability worse, have prompted discussions of whether a global facility is needed to help stabilise international markets.   The International Food Policy Research Institute suggested a physical grain reserve for humanitarian assistance and a "virtual reserve and intervention mechanism to calm markets under speculative situations, backed-up by a financial fund.   In Africa the World Food Programme (WFP) is trying to build a forecasting system to predict where food shortages are likely to allow the pre-positioning of food aid, though this is work in progress and WFP has little core funding for it.   The broader issue of agricultural trade reform remains locked down. There is little sign of the Doha round of international trade talks, to which agriculture is central, being successfully concluded in the near future. Indeed the price volatility, uncertainties and stresses of the last few years have left some governments with the view that global markets are a thoroughly unreliable route to national food security.   The lack of confidence in global markets has driven some countries to push ahead with alternative food security strategies built around direct investment and bilateral relationships.   State-backed investments in foreign land for food production have attracted considerable attention over the past year.   The most prominent buyers have been Gulf states. Deals have been announced between various Middle Eastern companies and investment funds, and counterparties in Africa, South and South-East Asia. These have prompted concerns that include the impacts on existing land users, the economic benefit to the supplying country and broader issues of food sovereignty.   Japan is leading an international effort to define a new set of "investor principles" to govern such deals. These efforts are gaining greater support but will need to involve investors, many of whom are far removed from the donors, global banks and multinational corporations that are used to working with such initiatives.   While contracts like these raise important questions, they are only part of a much broader picture of land investment for food, biofuels and industrial crops. Even individual investors now have numerous investment options, from large funds with strategies to acquire and lease land, to small start-ups with ambitious business plans to release the latent productive potential of Mozambique or the Ukraine. And land continues to be a currency of political patronage in places where property rights accrue more easily to the rich than the poor.   OECD countries current biofuel policies exacerbate the world"s food supply and sustainability problem. Some heat has come out of the "fuel versus food" debate, but biofuel policies continue to have an impact on food markets. Their influence will remain as long as the United States and European policies require suppliers of transport fuels to blend in an increasing proportion of biofuels. This strengthens the link between food prices and the oil price by making food commodities, in effect, an unprocessed petrol or diesel substitute.   The use of maize for ethanol in the US may reach 104 million tonnes this year and next. Total world demand for cereals as a feedstock in producing of biofuels is expected to reach 125 million tonnes – up nine percent on 2007-2008. With average consumption of cereals at 153 kilogrammes per person, the quantity of cereals diverted to biofuels is now, in crude terms, equivalent to the annual cereal consumption of around eight hundred million people.   Saving greenhouse gasses and increasing fuel security through grain-based biofuels rather than smarter technology – better fuel efficiency for example – risks effects that will be born principally by the poor and the environment. Biofuel demand directly influences prices and has a range of indirect effects that flow out around the world. A recent study found that in some African countries, foreign biofuel investments were absorbing more land than those targeting food.   The efforts being made to build systems to monitor biofuel sustainability may temper the effects on specific sites, but will struggle to manage the consequences of the boost to total demand for agricultural products, and thus land. Unwinding biofuel subsidies will get no easier as the scale of the farm incomes and industrial capital involved increases.   The needs of African agriculture are now back on the agenda, but transforming its productivity is a long term endeavour that requires cash and commitment.   The constraints that prevent subsistence farmers from raising production in a normal year also hinder their ability to do so when prices are high. They need direct help, and infrastructure, supply-chain and market development.   The food price crisis put agricultural investment, especially for Africa, back on donors and lenders list of priorities. The World Bank Group will increase its support to global agriculture.   In June the G8 leading industrial countries said they would invest $20 billion over three years to encourage the rural development of poor countries. Such promises need to be converted quickly to real investment if their ambition is ever to be realised. The history of grand donor initiatives is not entirely encouraging.   Back in 2003 African heads of state signed the Maputo Declaration, committing themselves to raising agricultural productivity growth to six percent a year and allocating ten percent of budgets to agriculture by 2008. The latest survey, using data for 2007, found only nineteen countries had exceeded the ten percent target, while more than half were spending less than five percent.   But changes in agriculture is critically important to the entire development agenda. The broader impacts on agricultural growth can be very significant. It is effective at reducing poverty and stimulates wider growth in the economy through the boost it provides to consumption. Alleviating poverty reduces the blight on lives and livelihoods that hunger imposes.   There is no time to waste. Research suggests that climate change is likely to hit farm productivity hardest in today"s centres of hunger – sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. Making agriculture there far more productive addresses the problems of today, and builds a buffer against the threats of tomorrow.   There is much more work to be done before world leaders can take a repeat of the food price crisis off their list of problems. The underlying factors that caused the last price crisis remain. Over the past year, the world has made some progress in addressing them, but too little.   Fair weather, the decline in energy prices and softening of demand brought on by the global economic down-turn provided some relief, but investment, capacity-building, market reform and research need more attention. We are a long way from a food system that is strong enough to deal with real short-term risks or properly prepared for the challenges of the decades ahead.
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