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	Buying into the greening of Africa by UN News / Africa Progress Panel Ethiopia   March 2010 (UN News)   One in three Africans are chronically hungry, despite $3 billion spent on food aid for the continent annually and $33 billion in food imports, the director of food security at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has warned.   Much of the money that Africa spends to import food could be better diverted to domestic production for regional and global trade, contributing to poverty reduction and repositioning Africa in the global economy, said Josue Dione, Director of Food Security and Sustainable Development of ECA, at a conference on agribusiness in Nigeria.   “African agriculture is thirsty as less than 4 per cent of the total arable land is irrigated compared to 33 per cent in Asia and the Pacific and 29 per cent in the Middle East. African agriculture is hungry as it receives only 14.6 kilograms of fertilizers per hectare, against 114.3 kilograms per hectare for all developing countries,” Mr. Dione said.   Africa’s share in world agriculture trade fell to 3.2 per cent in 2006 from 5.4 per cent in the 1980s and 15 per cent in the 1960s, according to ECA.   The continent’s small share in regional and global agricultural trade is strongly associated with a shift in world agricultural trade away from bulk commodities, Mr. Dione said.   “A Significant part of global agro-food trade has moved downstream along the value chains, and thus become less dependent purely on natural-resource endowment,” Mr. Dione said.   Yet moving Africa’s food and agriculture system towards processed, higher value-added products has been more difficult for the continent than for other developing regions.   Mr. Dione said while Africa is suffering from a competitive disadvantage in agro-processing, better policies can help improve the business environment and create the conditions necessary for higher private investment in agribusiness.   ECA has advocated for the development of regional value chains for selected agricultural commodities, which would allow domestic production to gain more resources.   “Developing agriculture for broad-based economic growth, food security and poverty reduction in Africa now requires an integrated approach to investing in improving productivity and efficiency at all stages of the commodity value chains, from research and development, to input markets, farm-level production, processing, storage, handling, transport, distribution to the final consumer,” Mr. Dione said.   Dec 2009   Buying into the greening of Africa, by Bob Geldof. (Africa Progress Panel)   It"s now 25 years since the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s and the public"s unprecedented outpouring of generosity to their fellow human beings on another continent. The question I"m always asked, of course, is: was it all worth it?   What"s changed in Ethiopia and in Africa as a whole? A great deal - for both better and worse.   Recently I was back in Ethiopia, where these two types of change are quite apparent. On the positive front economic growth has boomed: indeed, next year Ethiopia is expected to be among the top five fastest-growing economies in the world. Education enrolment has been doubled, malaria death rates have halved and HIV/AIDS is on the decline.   Mobile telephony is spreading (though it would be faster if privatised) and rural roads are linking remote areas to markets and health and education services.   Above all, while too many people are still reliant on food aid, famine will be avoided this year as it has been for the past 18 years, as distribution and early-warning systems have improved. Certainly, the Ethiopian Government could be more transparent, but on the whole it is making progress in a continent that has been doing likewise.   Then there is the negative change - that of the climate. Many of the villagers I"ve met mark the mid-1980s as when they really saw how their weather patterns were changing. Since then increasingly erratic rainfall has forced them to radically alter their farming practices.   Communities we visited in Tigray have had to rename the months of the year because the names were based on the seasons. They"ve now given up as the pattern of the seasons has changed so quickly. People told us how reduced rainfall has cut their income from farming. This, in turn, strains the social fabric. Thefts are becoming more common and children are forced out of the home to work.   If allowed to spread and worsen to its logical conclusion, the kind of social disintegration we"re now seeing in Ethiopia could have a chilling trajectory. It is all too easy for extreme poverty and climate change to feed a vicious cycle, making people more vulnerable to extremist politics.   A band of extreme poverty and instability across the Sahel and Sahara - worsened by climate change - would be bad for Europe. It is completely avoidable.   The tension between the positive and negative changes in Ethiopia is palpable. Which direction wins depends on the choices Ethiopians make, and to some extent on us.   And it"s not all about us having to make sacrifices; there are opportunities, too. Whether or not you believe the scientific consensus about climate change, there"s an inevitability to the way our own economies are adapting - and an economic rationale for us to buy into this change.   The inefficiencies of the hydrocarbon economy will be replaced by clean, cheap renewables; carbon finance trading will be a major industry in the near future.   China is charging into renewables as Germany has already, with green jobs the fastest expanding new source of employment.   Carbon finance and the market can help link solutions in Britain to solutions in Africa. For example, growing trees to capture carbon could become a new cash crop for Africa"s farmers if the right framework is agreed in Copenhagen.   Investing in agriculture in Africa, both through government aid and private funds, is critical; it can also be highly profitable. Of all our undelivered development promises, the rich world"s promises on agriculture are especially important.   Twenty-five years ago the story was one of Africa starving. Now, despite food shortages in some regions, there is a new story. It is a story backed by hard statistics, of an Africa rising. The last continent to be developed, with a burgeoning middle class and 900 million producers and consumers, Africa is where some of the best returns on investment will be made in the next few decades.   We must partner as we have promised with these people, for the sake of our global economy as well as our global environment, because in another 25 years we may just need them more than they need us. 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	Don’t drive hunger, warns ActionAid report into biofuel consumption in Europe by Action Aid / Earth Policy Institute   Up to 100 million more people could go hungry if Europe commits itself to a huge increase in biofuels consumption in order to meet new European Union legislation, a new report from ActionAid.   The legislation states that 10 per cent of transport fuels must come from renewable sources by 2020. EU member states will fill almost all of their renewables targets by using industrial biofuels – fuels made on an industrial scale from agricultural crops, including important staple foods.   The vast majority of industrial biofuels are made from maize, wheat, sugar cane and vegetable oils such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed.   In its report ‘Meals per gallon: the impact of industrial biofuels on people and global hunger’ ActionAid calculates that by 2020 biofuel consumption in the EU will jump nearly four-fold and that two thirds will be imported, mainly from the developing world.   As well as diverting food away from the people who need it most, this will push up prices. It is estimated that for every one per cent rise in the price of food, 16 million more poor people become hungry.   ActionAid also says that most industrial biofuels do not save greenhouse gas emissions when compared to the fossil fuels they are replacing.   The increasing use of biofuels is resulting in massive land use change, often in carbon rich habitats such as tropical rainforests. Using extra fertiliser to grow biofuels releases nitrous oxide, one of the most powerful greenhouse gasses.   Report author Tim Rice said: “Miracles do not grow on trees, or from any other plants for that matter. Using crops to fuel cars increases hunger while failing to help stop climate change.   “The huge expansion in industrial biofuels use must be stopped. To meet the EU deadline, the UK government is now writing its national action plan which will set out its strategy for renewable energy for the next ten years. This plan must not commit the UK to any further increase in industrial biofuels.”   To meet the EU 10 per cent target solely from biofuels, the total land area directly required to grow industrial biofuels in poor countries could reach 17.5 million hectares, well over half the size of Italy. ActionAid has already found that increased biofuel use is having disastrous impacts on the developing world. Multinationals are acquiring land on a colossal scale.   Across developing countries as a whole, EU companies have already acquired or are in negotiations for at least 5 million hectares. This has led to displacement of people, lack of consultation and compensation, broken promises about wages and job opportunities, and food scarcity.   “The world is at a turning point. EU governments must recognise the problems inherent in industrial biofuels and act immediately to change their policies on the use of biofuels. If they don’t, they open the door to a future for the world’s poor where hunger and climate crises continue to grow,” said Tim Rice.   ActionAid is calling on EU member states to ensure they do not lock in industrial biofuels into their 2010 national action plans. The charity also says that transport and energy consumption must be reduced, targets and financial incentives for industrial biofuels ended and more support given to small-scale sustainable biofuels in the EU and elsewhere.   Feeding Cars, Not People. (Earth Policy Institute)   The Guardian newspaper recently ran a story with the headline "One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars not people, new figures show".   That is a serious amount of corn and other grain crops that has been diverted into bio-fuel, mainly ethanol, for use in motor vehicles. President George Bush began subsidising farmers to produce ethanol and required the car companies to make cars that can use it. Since 2007, the amount of corn grown for fuel in the US has doubled.   In the meantime, the World Bank has said that the increase in bio-fuel production has led to greater demand for wheat, soy, maize and palm oil. As a result, world food prices have been driven up and poverty in poor countries has increased, as has malnutrition.   The Earth Policy Institute has estimated that the amount of grain grown in the US to produce fuel was enough to feed 330 million people for a year. We don"t know how many people died because of the quantities of food that never made it into the food market.   World agriculture today faces pressure from many sources. On the production side, the amount of unused arable land worldwide has dwindled. Overworked soils are becoming eroded and degraded, and overpumped aquifers are being depleted.   Meanwhile, as the global population grows and increasing biofuel production converts grain into fuel for cars, demand for food continues to climb. Here are some highlights from recent Earth Policy Institute research.   In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, human populations increased threefold from 1961 to 2007, while livestock populations grew 12-fold. Increasing foraging needs and human food needs have placed excessive demands on soils. The country is losing 867,000 acres of cropland and rangeland to desertification each year.   On the water front, Saudi Arabia stands out as a dramatic example. Following the 1970s Arab oil export embargo, the Saudis, fearing a retaliatory embargo on grain, decided to become self-sufficient in wheat. They heavily subsidized irrigation, pumping water at great depths from a non-replenishable fossil aquifer, in order to farm the desert.   Yet in early 2008, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the Saudis announced that with their aquifer largely depleted, they would reduce their wheat planting each year until 2016, when wheat production will end. Although Saudi Arabia is the first country to acknowledge publicly how falling water tables are affecting harvests, over half the world’s population lives in countries where aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be replenished.   World food production continues to increase, yet the rate at which it is increasing has slowed. From 1970 to 1990, world grain production grew by 64 percent. From 1990 to 2009, it increased by only 24 percent. Past growth in agricultural production was fueled in part by expanding irrigation: world irrigated area tripled from 1950 to 2000.   However, the expansion of irrigated areas has since slowed significantly as land and water availability has declined, showing almost no growth in the past decade. When growing global population is taken into account, this trend becomes even more concerning.   The world irrigated area per thousand people has declined from a high of over 47 hectares (116 acres) in the late 1970s to only 43 hectares (106 acres) per thousand people in 2007.   Growing populations and pressures on agricultural production have meant increasing food insecurity around the globe. The number of hungry people in the world declined from 878 million in 1970 to 825 million in the mid-1990s, but it has been rising ever since. In 2009, for the first time, the world’s hungry numbered more than 1 billion.   The global agricultural situation may be dire, but with action to improve to land and water management and measures to address population growth, we still have the ability to restore our agricultural systems and the ability to act to secure food supplies. Visit the related web page
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