View previous stories
	Developing Countries still hurting from High Food Prices by IRIN / UN News   July 2009   Developing countries still hurting from high food prices.   Despite a drop in international food prices and good cereal harvests overall, prices in developing countries remain high, hurting millions of poor people in both rural and urban areas, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in a report released today.   In several countries, current prices exceed last year’s highs or stand at record levels, according to the “Crop Prospects and Food Situation” report.   In 27 sub-Saharan African nations, FAO found that 80 to 90 per cent of all cereal prices remain over 25 per cent higher than before the food price crisis two years ago.   “The high food price situation continues to give rise to concern for the food security of vulnerable populations in both urban and rural areas, as these groups spend a large share of their incomes on food,” the publication said.   In Sudan, prices of sorghum, a type of grain, were three times higher in June than they were two years ago. In Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, maize prizes have doubled, while in Southern Africa, they have dropped recently due to a good harvest but remain well above pre-2007 levels.   Spurring continued high prices in poorer nations are reduced harvests, higher or delayed imports, civil conflicts, strong demand in neighbouring countries, devalued national currencies, and higher transport costs, among other factors, said FAO.   The report also cautioned that 30 countries around the global are in crisis and require assistance due to natural disasters, insecurity and economic problems.   16 July 2009   UN official welcomes G8 leaders commitment to boosting food security.   David Nabarro, Coordinator of the High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis said the recent pledge made by leaders of the so-called Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries to mobilize $20 billion towards boosting food security is a “substantive” commitment. With the G8 countries themselves knowing they are going to be held to account over that pledge” he said.   “We are pleased that food security is now back and central on the international agenda”. But Mr Nabarro cautioned that the added spending should not come at the expense of other priorities, such as health and education.   Mr. Nabarro also noted, the funding gap currently faced by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which he described as “the world’s anti-famine mechanism.” The agency at present is two-thirds short of the resources needed to respond to food demands worldwide, he said.   Robert Orr, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, stressed that the outcome from the G8 gathering is “a first step, and there’s much more to be done.”   16 July 2009   Poor countries need to rethink development model.   The world’s poorest countries are bearing the brunt of the global economic crisis and their governments need to review the development model they have followed for the past three decades if they are to substantially reduce poverty and achieve long-term growth, a new United Nations report concludes.   The report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), says “the crisis should be grasped as a turning point” for the so-called Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – a classification grouping the 49 poorest States around the globe.   “The magnitude of the crisis offers both the necessity and an opportunity for change,” according to the report, which says LDCs are particularly vulnerable to the current crisis because they have small economies and are so dependent on international trade, capital flows and finance.   The report notes that, in recent decades, many LDCs have severely reduced the role of government in promoting development. Yet the current crisis has “exposed the myth of self-regulating markets” and neo-liberal economic policies have also not succeeded in tackling other problems such as bottlenecks in production, chronic deficits and shortages of skills and knowledge among the labour force.   The roles of the state and the market must be rebalanced, UNCTAD argues, and many affluent countries have already started shifting to include a much bigger role for the state in economic management, especially through fiscal stimulus packages.   “Yet this tendency has been more evident in the advanced countries than in the developing world… most LDCs simply cannot afford to deploy similar packages.”   Most LDCs are also behind schedule in their efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the globally agreed set of social and economic targets that are supposed to be realized by 2015.   Wealthy countries must boost their support for struggling nations as well, the report emphasizes. “This is not simply a question of more and better aid, but also the design of rules that govern international economic relationships with regard to trade, finance, investment and technology flows.”   15 July 2009   Less money, less food, more hungry. (IRIN)   If the global economy were to rebound in 2010, sub-Saharan Africa would still be one of the world"s poorest and most vulnerable regions, and have more than half its people food insecure, says an examination of the impact of the economic slowdown on food security. The trade deficits created by the 2008 food price crisis, lagging agricultural productivity, and political instability in countries like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo will make it hard for many countries in the region to recover, said the Food Security Assessment 2008-09 by the US Department of Agriculture"s Economic Research Services (ERS).   The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which derived the number from the ERS assessment, said there were now more than a billion people hungry worldwide. With the full effect of the financial downturn difficult to predict, the assessment developed scenarios for the 70 poorest countries in five regions - sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a regional organization of former Soviet republics - taking into account projections by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its updated World Economic Outlook in January 2009.   In the first scenario the ERS projects a drop in export earnings, affecting a country"s capacity to import and bringing a decline in food consumption. The dip in export earnings reflects regional declines in economic growth projected by the IMF: 50 percent decline in export growth in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, 40 percent in Asia, 60 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the CIS.   In the second scenario, a 50 percent slump in the capital inflows that finance imports is added to the factors in the first scenario. A third scenario looked at the impact of the slowdown if a full economic recovery were to take place in the rest of the world in 2010.   Sub-Saharan Africa   Though sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 25 percent of the population in the 70 countries, it has 47 percent of the food-insecure people, the assessment noted.   The region has become increasingly dependent on cereal imports, which have risen from around 10 percent of its supplies in the late 1980s to more than 20 percent at present. "Therefore, when international cereal prices rise, the ability to import is likely to fall, given the limited financial capacity of the region."   A drop in export earnings, as in the first scenario, would bring a three percent rise in the number of food insecure. Among the worst affected would be countries that have done well economically in recent years such as Angola, which has benefited from high oil prices.   In the second scenario, which takes financial inflows into account, the number of food-insecure people in the region would increase by nine percent, or 36 million.   Cape Verde, Côte d"Ivoire, Lesotho, Mauritania and Senegal are experiencing rising food insecurity because of their growing dependence on imports, while in Eritrea, Somalia and Sierra Leone, which are highly dependent on foreign aid, food insecurity is likely to deepen. Sub-Saharan Africa"s share of food aid has grown "from roughly a third to well over half" of the world total since 1999, noted the assessment.   Asia   Asia is the region least dependent on food imports, and its food-security situation was "good, in relative terms". However, a decline export earnings would affect food security in the region "deeply, with the number of food-insecure people increasing by 11 percent. This comes after the Asian countries experienced the highest export growth relative to other regions (over 10 percent per year since 2000)".   If there is a decline in export growth and a cutback in net capital inflows, the number of food-insecure people in Asia is projected to increase by 13 percent in 2009 - relative to the food-security baseline - driven by the impact of the economic shock in Bangladesh and the Philippines.   Despite its economic progress, a drop in capital inflows into Bangladesh would leave 40 percent of its more than 153 million people food insecure; in the Philippines the number of hungry could jump to around 20 percent of the population of more than 96 million.   The food security outlook in Asia over the next 10 years shows that over 20 percent of this region"s population would be food insecure. Visit the related web page
	Sustainable Development by William Clark Harvard University   Sustainable development, as characterized more than 20 years ago by the World Commission on Environment and Development, seeks to meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”   Sustainability science has emerged over the last decade as a diverse set of interdisciplinary research and innovation activities pursued in support of society’s efforts to navigate a transition toward sustainability.   William Clark, Harvey Brooks professor of international science, public policy and human development, is an ecologist who co-directs the Sustainability Science Program at the Center for International Development.   Q: Please explain your ideas regarding the interconnection between nature and society.   Clark: If we look around the world today and throughout history, we see cases in which humans have interacted with their environments in incredibly destructive ways. Take the Aral Sea, or the Love Canal case in which declining well-being of the environment and of society undermined one another in downward spirals of mutual destruction.   On the other hand, we have contrasting situations – take modern day Pittsburgh, or some of the areas of long-term rice cultivation in Asia – in which the productivity of the environment and the well-being of people have prospered in mutually supporting ways. The scientific challenge today is to figure out what differentiates those two classes of cases. What is it about ways in which humans organize their interactions with the environment that lead to mutually supportive outcomes, rather than the mutually destructive ones?   Humans receive a flow of services from functioning environments – everything from climate regulation to water purification to oxygen production. We can manage environments – farms, factory areas and so on – in ways that enhance and sustain those flows of services or we can disregard them, especially those that don’t enter the marketplace. But by disregarding them, we guarantee that they will be overexploited and undersupplied to the ultimate detriment of humanity.   So the question is, what kind of feedback mechanisms and governance institutions can be constructed that will guide development in ways that both promote prosperity in the short run and nurture environmental systems and their services on which our long term well-being depends?   Q: When you talk about sustainable development, you talk about influencing norms. Please explain.   Clark: When we analyze how humans use their environments, there are two sets of questions. The first focuses on engineering and economic concerns: what kind of planet can we get? What kind of flows of services are we technically capable of extracting from the planet? But there’s another critical question: what kind of planet do we want? This question is about equity: equity across places (is it fair that I dump my pollution on you? and equity across generations - is it fair that we emit greenhouse gasses that will endanger our children and grandchildren?.   So you cannot escape making central value judgments about equity and fairness in answer to this “what kind of a world?” question. Sustainability science therefore grapples with the question of what sort of trade offs – present versus future, us versus them – are appropriate as we intervene and try to manage our environment?
	View more stories