Paddy stock being salvaged from open space storage in Bhubaneswar as monsoons arrive early this year. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

Shooing off a quartet of hens that come pecking, 24-year-old Kamala Batra sits guard over a sack of coarse rice spread out on the courtyard. After small black insects slowly crawl away in the sun’s heat, she gathers it to cook for the day’s free midday meal – a pan-India government food security scheme for students.

Batra, a member of the women’s collective that cooks school meals in Kosagumuda village, in the tribal Nabrangpur district of the eastern state Odisha, says government supplies of old and almost inedible food grains under the subsidised public distribution system are not uncommon.

A recent report from the national auditor, tabled in parliament, found that India did not have space to store 33 million tonnes of foodgrain worth 12 billion dollars, which it had bought from farmers for various government food security schemes.“Thirteen percent of [India's] gross domestic product (GDP) is wasted every year due to wastage of food grains in the supply chain.” -- Dinesh Rai, India's Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority.

This constituted a 40-percent shortage in storage space, for a total stock of  82 million tonnes that was held by the Food Corporation Of India (FCI) in June last year.

A 1964-born monolith under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, FCI procures, disburses and maintains buffer food grains, mainly rice, wheat and coarse grains, countrywide.

FCI has recently resorted to wheat export to ease the storage problem.

“How will it handle additional quantities that will have to be mandatorily procured when India formalises the National Food Security Bill (NFSB)”, asked food security activist Badal Tah from tribal populated Rayagada distric, which in 2002 saw a national uproar over deaths due to starvation.

Malnourishment and inequitable access to food are unwieldy issues India is currently grappling with as the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reach closure in 2015.

The NFSB will provide legal entitlement to subsidised food grains to around 67 percent of India’s over-two-billion population. It is likely to cost the exchequer about 21 billion dollars.

Tah is joined by a strong section that says India may well be comfortably placed in regard to the availability of food grains, but its present infrastructure and approach to crop management need structural changes before it can implement the food security law.  The bill has been debated in parliament since December 2011.

Assessing a five-year period from 2007 to 2012, a recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) tabled in parliament in May of this year, severely indicts the FCI for colossal mismanagement in food procurement, storage and evacuation.

According to the report, FCI has gone on procuring, even though last summer about nine million tonnes of grain lay around in open spaces to deteriorate in monsoon rains. What’s more, grains from 2007 were still unused and rotting in 2012, because the first-in-first-out policy of supplying older grains before newly procured ones was not observed. Old grain was left to deteriorate in storage – infested supplies like the ones Kamala Batra was sun-cleansing in the courtyard.

While a volley of recent studies reiterates colossal food wastage owing to inadequate and unscientific storage infrastructure, up to 20 percent of India’s population live on 1.25 dollars a day.

A 2013 report from the London-based Institution of Mechanical Researchers, “Global food: waste not, want not”, finds India wastes a quantity of wheat equivalent to the entire production of Australia every year, of which 21 million tonnes perishes every year due to a lack of inadequate storage and distribution.

FCI itself admits India lost 79 million tonnes, or nine percent of total wheat produced over a four-year period from 2009 to 2013.

“Thirteen percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) is wasted every year due to wastage of food grains in the supply chain,” said Dinesh Rai, a senior official of the federal government’s Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority.

Aside from food grains, India loses 12 million tonnes of fruits and 21 million tonnes of vegetables every year due to a lack of cold storage facility, according to a 2009 study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

In India’s remote areas, in a bumper harvest year, fast perishable vegetables like tomatoes are sold at dump prices for two rupees, or 25 cents, per kilogramme.

Lack of storage is a major tool in the middleman’s hands to exploit the small farmers.

“We wait for government procurement officials to get the minimum support price (MSP), but they have delayed these last two years,” Raju Jani told IPS from Odisha’s Koraput district.

They are heavily in debt, he said, for things like seeds and fertilisers, “So we give our harvest to the rice miller’s agent for whatever price he offers”.

With storage space shortfall and a go-slow government procurement, farmers are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – the loan shark and the middleman.

The CAG report has questioned the basis for high a MSP, which is being viewed increasingly as a political sop to voters. According to current rules, if farmers come forth to sell at MSP, the government cannot decline to buy or set a cut-off procurement quantity.

This is yet another reason for excessive procurement of food grains over the last few years. It however benefits the large landholders more, say a section of political observers.

In 2012, it cost the federal government 16 billion dollars to overall handle the grain it bought at MSP, including transportation, storage and other overheads; its subsidised disbursement, in turn, fetched 4.7 billion dollars.

With the food security law, the government would procure much larger quantities for distribution, at subsidised prices of one to three rupees (about 0.02 to 0.05 dollars).

Amid the losses, many NGOs are calling for the reinstitution of  village level grain banks.

“Farmers lost their self reliance, all because of the centralized food production of wheat and paddy. Multi-cropping should be brought back,” Thooran Nambi, of the Tamil Nadu Farmers Association, told IPS from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu State.

He’s in favour of abolishing subsidised food for rural people, saying it should be given during emergencies only, he added.

In its study, the Institute of Mechanical Researchers recommends developed nations transfer their engineering knowledge, technology and design know-how to developing countries.

Meanwhile, “The storage and warehousing sector should get infrastructure status,” Suman Jyoti Khaitan, who heads a policy advocacy group, told IPS. “So that finances are availabe and the private sector can get in, too.”

Antonio Onorati. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

The International Planning Committee for Food Security (IPC) is the largest organisation of small food producers in the world, representing 300 million people, including La Via Campesina with its 200 million members.

It has been keeping an eye on FAO for over two decades. According to Onorati, the U.N. body has made significant progress in this period.

“In the 1980s, you couldn’t have imagined entering to the conference of FAO as civil society unless you maybe knew someone who brought you to a reception,” he tells TerraViva. “Now we are participants in the World Committee on Food Security and we are starting to have a say in the FAO technical committees. It is another world.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why did IPC focus its work on FAO?

A: At FAO, the decision is made according to one state – one vote rule, which is very important, because in other places, such as the World Bank, the rule is one dollar – one vote.

In places like the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation, if you are a small producer, you have no chance: you can be an expert, you can be an observer, but when it comes to deciding you have no chance. Here, at least, you have a voice, you have the opportunity for conflict, because our members from organisations all over the world get to speak to their elected representatives.

Q: What important changes do you note in the organisation?

A: One interesting change we are seeing now is the increase in financial contributions from BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. More important than the money they put into FAO is the fact that large developing countries are breaking the powerful dominant position of the OECD countries.

And this is important because the model of OECD countries is not able to bring new solutions, while we are seeing interesting things coming from developing countries: Brazil’s Fome Zero programme is famous, but what is less known is that China too has managed to cut the number of its food insecure people to half.

Another welcome change is that regional conferences are coming before the international one in Rome, so regions have a bigger word to say in setting priorities.

Q: What do you think of Da Silva’s programme for reforming FAO?

A: The reform is a necessity. Reducing staff and establishing clear chains of command was welcome. The food systems approach proposed by FAO is something we very much favour but might be resisted by some of the member states.

When it comes to the money, it is important to pay attention to the distinction between the regular budget made up of obligatory contributions, and the voluntary contributions, or the trust funds. The regular budget is the only money whose use is decided by the plenary, that is, democratically.

Trust funds, on the other hand, are a way for governments to condition FAO’s work: when a donor gives an amount, that donor can indicate the use of the money [the regular budget was 1.005 billion U.S. dollars for 2012/13 and voluntary contributions stood at a similar level]. It would be important to break the conditionality between the donor money and FAO’s work, but we are far from that step.

Q: How substantial do you feel is FAO’s engagement with civil society?

A: The real breakthrough was becoming participants in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies]. When it comes to FAO itself, the technical committees represent the essence of the work and there is where we have to have more space. In the biennial conference, we get to speak at the end of the end of the end and as NGOs.

FAO was set up after Yalta, which was a deal between big powers and big men, and in the spirit that peasants do not understand anything. But the reality is different and there is an increased recognition now that we have to be a part of the decision-making process because we are a part of the solution. If you don’t speak to the peasant, with whom do you speak?

The current DG and the previous one have been very supportive of this change. Governments too must understand that they should not be afraid of the small food producers, who are their citizens.

Excerpt:

Pope Francis has challenged the Food and Agriculture Organisation to end global food disparities, describing it as scandalous that despite food abundance, millions of people still die of hunger.

Delegates to the 38th FAO conference have a brief session with Pope Francis in the Vatican. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“It is a well-known fact that current levels of production are sufficient, yet millions of people are still suffering and dying of starvation,” the head of the Roman Catholic Church said during a special meeting with delegates to the 38th Biennial FAO Conference at the Vatican’s Sale Clementina within the Basilica.

“This is truly scandalous. A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table.”

Pope Francis said the world can no longer hide behind goodwill and unmet promises, nor use the current global crisis as a pretext for failing to act on accessing food to everyone. He lamented that human dignity risked turning into a vague abstraction in the face of issues like war, malnutrition, marginalisation and financial speculation which affected the price of food, which was being treated like any other market product.

Praising the reforms initiated by FAO as a positive development for functional, transparent and impartial operations, the Pope said the fight against hunger means dialogue and fraternity for the world food body.

“What is demanded of the FAO, its member states and every institution of the international community is openness of heart,” said Pope Francis. “There is need to move beyond indifference or a tendency to look the other way and urgently to attend to immediate needs, confident that the fruits of today’s work will mature in future.”

Award-winning farmer from Ghana Lemuel Martey Quarshie, one of the delegates who met the Pope, tells TerraViva, “I was happy to meet the Pope because for me this was a once in a lifetime experience. If I had the chance to ask the Pope something, I would have asked him if his role is only pastoral intervention or he can also foster dialogue on food issues.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which works to end malnutrition among more than two billion people worldwide, is expressing strong support  for enriching the micronutrient content of plants.

Cassava is a staple crop in Africa. The new variety promoted by CGIAR is more nutritious, contaning higher amounts of vitamin A, zinc, or iron. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

In technical terms, it is called biofortification: a nutrition-specific intervention designed to enhance the micronutrient content of foods through the use of agronomic practices and plant breeding.

The breeding is taking place at HarvestPlus, an international programme supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and at national agricultural research centres, mostly in developing countries.

The first nutritious crop, developed by African scientists and released in partnership with the Internal Potato Center (CIP), was the orange sweet potato, which has been effective in providing up to 100 percent of daily vitamin A needs for young children, according to CGIAR.

Six additional nutritious crops are now being developed through the use of conventional breeding methods: vitamin A-rich cassava and maize, iron-rich beans and pearl millet, and zinc-rich wheat and rice.

The first three crops are targeted to Africa and the rest to South Asia.

New varieties of the first four crops were launched in 2012, says CGIAR, with wheat and rice expected to follow later this year.

While it takes time to produce the amount of seed necessary to meet demand, up to half a million farmers will be growing these nutritious crops by year end, it predicts.

Asked how far plant breeding can go in resolving hunger and nutrition problems worldwide, Dr. Erick Boy, head of nutrition at HarvestPlus, told IPS, “Our focus is on hidden hunger, caused by not getting enough minerals and vitamins in the diet – that is the major hunger problem the world faces today.

“The six new varieties of staple crops we are developing are more nutritious—they contain higher amounts of vitamin A, zinc, or iron,” he added.

Lack of these nutrients is what causes widespread suffering and health problems, especially for women and children.

Boy said these crops will be distributed to more than three million farming households in seven countries in Africa and Asia by 2015.

“Not bad for a programme that started from scratch to develop these crops beginning only in 2003,” he noted.

When eaten regularly, these nutritious crops could provide on average 50 percent of vitamin A, zinc, or iron requirements. According to CGIAR, more than two billion people worldwide do not get enough of these crucial nutrients in their diets.

Deficiencies can lead to lower IQ, stunting, and blindness in children; increased susceptibility to disease for both children and adults; and higher health risks to mothers – and their infants – during childbirth.

According to the World Bank, malnourished children are more likely to drop out of school and have lower incomes as adults, thus reducing overall economic growth.

In its latest annual flagship publication The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) released here, FAO explains that unlike food fortification, which occurs during food processing, biofortification involves enriching the micronutrient content of plants.

Questions remain about the readiness of consumers to purchase biofortified foods, especially when they look or taste different from traditional varieties. But, FAO says, early evidence suggests that consumers are willing to buy them and may even pay a premium.

In Uganda, FAO discovered consumers were willing to pay as much for the orange-fleshed varieties of sweet potato as for the white varieties, even in the absence of a promotional campaign.

Similar results were found for nutritionally-enhanced orange maize in Zambia, where consumers did not confuse it with ordinary yellow or white maize. They were also willing to pay a premium when its introduction was accompanied by nutrition information.

Asked why the project targets Asia and Africa and not Latin America, CGIAR’s Dr. Boy said, “Our focus is on subSaharan Africa and South Asia because if you look at any map of hidden hunger, these are the regions marked in red.”

Latin American countries have done a better job of improving nutrition over the past two decades, he added. There are still, however, pockets where hidden hunger is a problem.

“So we are also working in this region. In fact, I am in Guatemala now to work with stakeholders to buy in to our high-iron beans and high zinc-maize initiative there. We anticipate that we could have varieties of two to three crops that are rich in iron and zinc to LAC farmers by 2015,” Boy added.

Meanwhile, in early June, the UK government granted £30 million [46.4 million dollars] to HarvestPlus to develop and deliver six nutritious crops to several million farming households in Africa and Asia.

The grant was announced at a high-level international meeting in London that brought together a range of partners to make strong political and financial commitments to improve nutrition globally.

In his opening remarks, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, “It has to be about doing things differently…For science, it’s about harnessing the power of innovation to develop better seeds, [and] more productive and nutritious crops.”

By Busani Bafana
ROME, Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

A spirited campaign by the World Rural Forum (WRF) – a grouping of civil society organisations – led to the declaration of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming by the U.N. General Assembly at its 66th session in 2011.

José Antonio Osaba García, World Rural Forum (WRF) and Coordinator of the International Year of the Family Farm. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

The IYFF seeks to highlight the importance of family farms in reducing poverty and attaining food security. Key to the sustainability of family farms is the security of land tenure.

José Antonio Osaba García, coordinator of the IYFF, tells TerraViva that the declaration of the IYFF was a major victory in the fight for the rights of farmers to own land.

More importantly, it coincided with a shift within FAO – increasingly criticised for its focus on industrial farming – to include more civil society participation and family farming in discussions and decisions on global food security. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why the Year of Family Farming?

A: Who feeds the world? Family farms. We have pushed for this year to honour family farmers. We are using the year to push for better policies for family faming because in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many millions of women and men farmers keep the world fed. They do not have an alternative source of livelihood but farming.

We should develop the rural world in Africa but with women and men farmers as the head the movement and not for them to be pushed aside like the tendency now by huge investments from abroad. Women and men farmers should be supported with access to infrastructure and access to credit. So the year is centered on dialogue in favour of family farming as the real model for sustainable agriculture.

Q: Was it easy to get the declaration?

A: Yes. It was easy because family farming is an important theme, it is not the theme of cereal, which is also relevant. We are promoting the rights of billions of the people and that is why this year is different. It is not the year of the mountain, which is extremely important, it is not the year of the rice, which is also extremely important, but the year of billions of farmers. We will launch the year next November and celebrations will start all over the world.

Q: As a civil society organisation (CSO), do you consider this your major victory?

A: Oh yes. We have been working on regional issues affecting farmers but this is the first major worldwide campaign and that is why it is so important because farmers may be in different continents with different situations, [but] they have common issues: access to land, accessing markets, challenges faced by women and youths, and we are using this year to articulate these issues.

Q: What does this mean about the participation of CSOs within the FAO?

A: This is the first time in history that a year has been declared by a social movement, not by governments. The voice of civil society has been heard and civil society can make a big difference in the global food security debate. We have more than 370 organisations in five continents in more than 65 countries working together.

We have a world consultative committee with representatives from each continent plus Oxfam International, IFAM, Slow Food and others. The World Rural Forum is just doing the coordination to keep the initiative together. The U.N. system needs civil society and civil society needs the U.N. so we are complimentary.

Excerpt:

A farmer looks out at a flooded paddy field in Laos. Credit: E Souk/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The future of food security in the Mekong region lies at a crossroads, as several development ventures, including the Xayaburi Hydropower Project, threaten to alter fish migration routes, disrupt the flow of sediments and nutrients downstream, and endanger millions whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong River basin’s resources.

Running through China, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Thailand and Cambodia to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, this is Asia’s seventh longest transboundary river.

An estimated 60 million people live within the lush river basin, and nearly 80 percent depend on the Lower Mekong’s waters and intricate network of tributaries as a major source of food.

But if all goes according to plan, 88 dams will obstruct the river’s natural course by 2030. Seven have already been completed in the Upper Mekong basin in China, with an estimated twenty more either planned or underway in the northwest Qinghai province, the southwestern region of Yunnan and Tibet.

Construction of the 3.5-billion-dollar Xayaburi Dam on the Lower Mekong in northern Laos is the first of eleven planned dam projects on the main stem of the Mekong River, with nine allocated for Laos and two in Cambodia.

Construction began in 2010 and as of last month the project was 10 percent complete.

At best these development projects will alter the traditional patterns of life here; at worst, they will devastate ecosystems that have thrived for centuries.

Over 850 freshwater fish species call the Mekong home, and several times a year this rich water channel is transformed into a major migration route, with one third of the species travelling over 1,000 kilometres to feed and breed, making the Mekong River basin one of the world’s most productive inland fisheries.

Large-scale water infrastructure development projects such as hydropower dams have already damaged the floodplains in the Lower Mekong and in the Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia, affecting water quality and quantity, lowering aquatic productivity, causing agricultural land loss and a 42-percent decline in fish supplies.

This spells danger in a region where fish accounts for 50 to 80 percent of daily consumption and micronutrient intake, Ame Trandem, Southeast Asia programme director for the non-profit International Rivers, told IPS.

Locating alternative protein sources such as livestock and poultry is no easy task and would require 63 percent more pasture lands and more than 17 percent more water.

“Cambodia is the largest fish eating country in the world. Get rid of the fish and you’re going to have serious problems because there is not enough livestock in Cambodia and Laos to compensate for the loss,” Trandem said.

With a total population of over 16 million, the Mekong Delta is known as the ‘rice bowl’ of Vietnam. It nurtures vast paddy fields that are responsible for 50 percent of national rice production and 70 percent of exports.

This low-lying delta depends on a natural cycle of floods and tides, with which Vietnamese farmers have long synchronised their planting and harvesting calendars.

Now, experts like Geoffrey Blate, senior advisor of landscape conservation and climate change for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Greater Mekong Programme in Thailand, say this delicate ecosystem is vulnerable to changes brought on by global warming and mega development projects.

Rising sea levels and salt water intrusion have already put Vietnamese communities in the Mekong Delta on red alert, “while sediment losses caused by upstream dams will exacerbate these problems. In addition, the increased precipitation and heavier downpours anticipated from climate change may also substantially alter flood regimes in the Delta,” Blate told IPS.

If all the dams are built, experts estimate that 220,000 to 440,000 tonnes of white fish would disappear from the local diet, causing hunger and leading to a rapid decline in rice production.

Electricity over sustainability?

Citing a shortage of energy, Thailand’s leading state-owned utility corporation, EGAT, signed an agreement to purchase 95 percent of the Xayaburi dam’s anticipated 1,285 megawatts (MW) of electricity.

Six Thai commercial banks comprise the financial muscle of the project, while construction is in the hands of Thailand’s CH. Karnchang Public Company Limited, with some support from the Laotian government.

But energy experts like Chuenchom Sangarasri Greacen, author of Thailand’s Alternative Power Development Plan, have poked holes in the claim that the dam is required to meet growing energy needs.

Thailand is a net importer of electricity, but a lot of it is utilised wastefully, she told IPS, adding that countries like Laos and Cambodia have a much more immediate need for electricity: the World Bank estimates that only 84 percent of the population in Laos and 26 percent in Cambodia have access to electricity, compared to 99.3 percent in Thailand.

But instead of developing their own generation capacities, these governments have chosen export projects that profit corporations over people.

“Thailand is creating a lot of environmental, social and food issues for local communities by extending its grid to draw power from beyond our borders,” Greacen said.

Already, 333 families from villages like Houay Souy in north-central Laos, who were moved to make way for the dam, are feeling the first hints of greater suffering to come.

Once a self-sufficient community that generated revenues via gold panning and cultivated their own riverbank gardens to produce rice, fruits and vegetables, villagers are now finding themselves without jobs, very little money and not enough food.

“The villagers’ primary source of food was fishing and agriculture. In their new location, about 17 km away from their old homes, they were given small plots of agricultural land but not enough for their daily consumption needs,” said Trandem.

“Ch. Karnchang never compensated them for lost fisheries, fruit trees or the riverbank gardens that were washed away. Their new homes were built with poor quality wood, which was quickly eaten into by termites, so what little compensation they did receive went to fixing their new homes,” she added.

These families, numbering about five members per household, are now barely surviving on 10 dollars per month and symbolise the gap between so-called poverty alleviation programmes and their impact on the ground.

“The Laos government claims that dams will generate revenue but in reality…projects like Xayaburi basically export benefits and profits away from the host country while smaller projects that are more economically sustainable are being ignored,” says Greacen.

She believes the Laotian government should explore small-scale renewable energy projects like biomass and micro-hydro plants that would attract local investment and directly serve local populations.

Blate also suggested building diversion canals for smaller dams, rather than obstructing the main stem of the Mekong River.

Tribal women converge at the Boipariguda weekly market to sell and buy farm produce. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Busani Bafana
Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

If slavery was a scourge to humanity, denying legitimate tenure rights is the cancer eating away the future of smallholder farmers who feed the world, often under trying conditions, say civil society organisations.

“The developed countries succeeded by developing their agriculture and the capital from agriculture was the basis for the industrial development thanks to the rights to land,” José Antonio Osaba Garcia from the World Rural Forum (WRF) and coordinator of the International Year of Family Farming (ITFF) tells TerraViva.

“Why is Africa and other countries not being allowed to develop their agriculture rooted in family farms as the basis for developing their countries? It is because land tenure is the heart of this.”"In many cases, national states consider under-used land as being available for disposal to outside investors." - Harold Liversage, IFAD

Hundreds of millions of small landholders, pastoralists and indigenous people do not hold formal land titles. And when it suits governments, they ignore this customary land holding and sell or lease the land to private companies.

Garcia says the global land rush, particularly in Africa, has exposed the extent to which smallholder farmers are being disposed of their ancestral lands that supported food security.

“Agriculture is the basis of development and we see that the pressure is strong in favour of big investors, many times at the expense of family farming, particularly in Africa and Latin America. I cannot single out models where land tenure is working, but we have heard about some success of land tenure in Brazil. But that too has had some problems.”

According to data compiled by the International Land Coalition, some 45 million hectares of land has been or is about to be signed over to foreign investors in Africa, Southern Asia and Latin America.

“It would seem that most land is already owned de facto by rural communities under a range of diverse tenure systems, although in many cases these rights are not registered,” Harold Liversage, a land tenure adviser for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), writes in an independent analysis on the issue.

“Also, in many cases, national states consider under-used land as being available for disposal to outside investors.”

Liversage says, however, that this perception is starting to change in many developing countries with the recognition that, while some land may be under-used, very little is not owned, vacant or unused.

In an effort to safeguard land tenure rights, FAO developed the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure, which has been endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security. The Guidelines seek the promotion and protection of land tenure, especially for vulnerable groups, through specific legislation.

At a side event to discuss the International Year of Family Farming and the Voluntary Guidelines, Francisca Rodrigues from La Vía Campesina expressed concern that the voluntary nature of the guidelines meant they were not enforceable.

“The application of the guidelines relies on the countries’ willingness and readiness to work on them and the commitment of government is crucial,” says FAO land tenure officer in the National Resources Management and Environment Department Francesca Romano.

“That is what they are made for: countries where tenure is insecure and where the governance of tenure is weak and where there are problems related to tenure of land, forests and fisheries. This is where they have to work,” she says.

Garcia tells TerraViva that while international investment in agriculture is welcome, it should not come at the expense of local family farmers through land grabs.

The Global Alliance Against Land Grabbing convened by La Vía Campesina and its allies in Mali in 2011 noted that land grabbing dislocated communities and endangered their identity.

“Those who dare stand up to defend their legitimate rights and survival of their families and communities are beaten, imprisoned and killed… The struggle against land grabbing is a struggle against capitalism,” La Via Campesina says.

A report titled Land Concentration, Land Grabbing and People’s Struggles In Europe, by European Coordination Via Campesina and Hands off the Land alliance published in April argues that land concentration and land grabbing do not occur only in developing countries in the South, but are happening in the North, too.

The report says, for instance, that just three percent of landowners in Europe have come to control half of all farmed land, with massive concentration of land ownership and wealth on a par with Brazil, Colombia and the Philippines.

Marcela Villareal, Director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Under the leadership of Brazilian Director General (DG) José Graziano da Silva, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has been engaged in a process of deep reform meant to make the organisation leaner and more effective in the fight against hunger. 

“One transformational element in the vision of the new DG is to seek  synergies among the various aspects of our work, so that we can be more focused and efficient in eliminating hunger,” explains FAO’s Marcela Villarreal, director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy. “I have been working for this organisation for 16 years and I can say that we are best when we take a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approach: it is this kind of approach that will allow us to find innovative ways to solve age-old problems.” Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What are the core elements of the programme of work proposed by Graziano da Silva for FAO?

A: We are proposing five strategic objectives, the first of which is the elimination of hunger – we are no longer speaking just about reducing it. It is important to note here that, if years ago we thought that by increasing food production we could eradicate hunger, today we know that it is not only about production levels but also about access to food.

The second objective refers to increasing food production in a sustainable manner and the third calls for the eradication of rural poverty.

A strategic thinking process laid down the foundations of the current programme of work.  The MDG targets and indicators are very much focused on urban areas, despite rural poverty being one of the main challenges today.

In FAO’s work on rural poverty, we will focus on three rural populations at risk of poverty: the smallholders, whom we will help become more productive; those who sell their labour in rural areas, for the benefit of whom we will help countries generate decent employment increasing incomes and  access food; and, finally, for those who get left out altogether we need to advise countries on the creation of social safety nets, but in a way that is not just giving out of money but that eventually supports production and /or employment."If we in the U.N. systems can make [big corporations] be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way." -- Marcela Villarreal

Finally, last two strategic objectives refer to offering farmers better and more equitable access to markets and, respectively, building people’s resilience, thus lowering vulnerability to threats and crises.

It is our member states that will have to meet these objectives. Our role will be to contribute in a strategic and measurable way to their meeting of these objectives.

Q: How much leverage does FAO actually have on member states that might not be fully behind this vision of sustainable food systems proposed by the organisation?

A: We are very optimistic that we can implement this vision. We already see big progress happening: on Sunday, 38 countries were awarded for halving hunger levels, so the fact that we already got halfway gives us a good indication that we can work to achieve the real target, which is zero hunger.

At this conference, it is clear that governments across the board support the vision and the programme of work of the DG. Of course, a good measure of political will is to see budget allocated to these issues.

Q: Over the past years, FAO has expressed an increased willingness to engage with civil society. Have they been involved in the drafting of the five strategic objectives?

A: We cannot achieve any of these objectives without partnerships with civil society, the private sector, farmer’s organisations, cooperatives, research institutes and others.

The involvement of civil society is crucial in national policy dialogue processes, where their voices need to be heard and we are helping to facilitate their participation.

When it comes to the international level, civil society has been fully  involved in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies].

If we speak about partnerships, it is important to say that the private sector is also very important to us, from the smaller producers to the bigger ones, as they are the biggest investors in agriculture in the world, bigger than governments, international development aid, or foreign investors. Private actors can bring to the table a lot of knowledge and innovation.

Q: When it comes to the private companies, are you selective in choosing the ones you deal with, to make sure you avoid those whose business models hurt small farmers or the poor for example?

A: Yes! We have very clear mechanisms for assessing risk and dealing with it. When it comes to companies, we first run a due diligence process to see whether they have had problems with labour, human rights issues, environmental protection or other issues. Then we have a subcommittee on partnerships that analyses all the possible risks, and finally we have a committee on partnerships headed by the DG in person. So we take this issue very seriously.

We cannot ignore big corporations, they are big players in the world, but if we in the U.N. systems can make them be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way.

Q: When it comes to governments and national policies then, how can we expect FAO to react when a government allows for problematic practices to take place on its territory (e.g., land grabbing) or when it engages in problematic practices itself?

A: We are an intergovernmental organisation belonging to the U.N. system, so we work with governments who are our members. Our role is to ensure that they have the best knowledge and the best technical assistance so that they can meet the objectives set out above.

We promote good governance, which involves transparency, participation and accountability. Here, let me quote the words of Amartya Sen, who said that “by generating a public discussion, we have a part of the solution”.

Excerpt:

Integrated management considers the environmental impact of a particular activity on the whole ecosystem, rather than just one particular resource. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Stella Paul
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The key to sustainable economic growth with an eye on fragile ecosystems is integrated management, FAO experts said here on Wednesday.

The holistic process – which considers the environmental impact of a particular activity on the whole ecosystem, rather than just one particular resource – is being implemented in partnership with communities and local governments in several of the organisation’s projects worldwide that aim to help millions achieve food security and overcome poverty.

In Vietnam, where 3.4 million people are dependent on lagoons for their livelihood through fishing and aquaculture, Integrated Management of Lagoon Activities (IMOLA) has become one of FAO’s most successful integrated management projects, according to Árni Mathiesen, assistant director general of the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department.

It decreased ecological degradation of Gian Tam – Cau Hai, the largest lagoon in the country, and triggered growth across multiple sectors including fisheries, aquaculture, sustainable resources and food and nutrition security, he said.

Livelihood activities over the years have created high pressure on the lagoon’s ecosystem and its natural resources. Reclamation of land for agriculture and poorly planned aquaculture development has further led to excessive fishing and the loss of nursery areas, according to Mathiesen.

Launched in 2005, FAO-IMOLA was designed to deal with these challenges and improve the livelihoods of the people dependent on the lagoon system. It worked alongside the government of Vietnam, the local provincial government agencies and its fisheries department to formulate a strategy for sustainable lagoon management through the Integrated Lagoon Management plan. The strategy included understanding the ecology of the lagoon and the various ways that people living around it used the water body for their livelihoods.

According to Gianni Ghisi, ambassador and permanent representative of Italy to the United Nations, it was the building of this partnership with local agencies that contributed greatly to the success of the project.

“Working with different communities has been very beneficial: it helped us build a decentralised corporation. The success of this project shows that it is possible to include so many actors,” he said. With an investment of 300 million dollars, Italy was the main funder of the project.

The project adopted a participatory methodology aimed at strengthening provincial institutional capacity, underlined Mathiesen. Further emphasis is put on sustainable use of hydro-biological resources and the improvement of the livelihoods of the poor in the area.

While the local communities were asked to stop certain fishing practices, such as use of the electric shock method and mesh wire nets, they were also educated about the fragility of the lagoon, which triggered their active participation in its preservation and that of their livelihoods.

Designed in three phases – a survey, the formulation of the management plan and the preparation of the plan – the project is now expected to be a model of integrated lagoon management plans that can later be replicated by other areas of Vietnam.

Soil degradation, climate change, heavy tropical monsoonal rains and pests are some of the challenges faced by young farmers in the Solomon Islands. The Kastom Garden Association, a local NGO, has helped implement composting and organic farming methods. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Busani Bafana
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The world needs a more sustainable food production system based on knowledge that prioritises the conservation of natural resources to boost agricultural yields over the heavy use of pesticides and other chemical inputs, say experts promoting the concept of agroecology.

A holistic study of agroecosystems focusing on environmental and human interrelationships, agroecology has been practised since the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago, and could offer answers to the challenge of producing food safely and sustainably for a rapidly growing global population.

“This practise is critical now because agriculture took a different pathway through the Green Revolution, so intensification was done based on inputs which caused a lot of consequences to natural resources, and therefore it is important to readjust those damages to environmental resources and produce  food in a different way,” FAO senior officer in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection Caterina Batello told TerraViva at a side event discussing agroecology as a path to the future.

“If we want to continue producing and increase production and maintain natural resources, this is the only way to go,” she said.

Batello said agroecology is being taken more seriously now because there is a growing body of scientific evidence that it works to sustain agricultural production and ensure resilience to climate change.

One recent report by the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food cites evidence showing agroecology techniques increased crop yields by 80 percent in 57 developing countries, with an average of 116 percent for all African projects.

“This is absolutely an important opportunity for developing countries, because it values existing traditional practises and can help farmers by increasing their knowledge to adopt new practises, but always based on their local ecosystems and the capacity of that system to produce.”

Agroecology developed as a response to concerns about the decline of natural resources, including biodiversity loss, as a result of modern agricultural practises.

FAO launched the concept in 2011 and seven developing countries – Senegal, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mozambique, Chad, Angola and Niger – are now participating in nine projects being implemented through farmer field schools involving local communities.

Fattoum Lakhdari, director of the Centre of Scientific Research and technical of Arid Regions (CRSTRA) in Algeria, says the world of science and agriculture needs to embrace local knowledge and academic knowledge for sustainable agriculture.

“Throughout the world, we need to converge more the scientific and the agricultural research. We need to work on the idea of involving communities in the development of academic best knowledge and not to neglect community knowledge.”

Healthy soil looks dark, crumbly, and porous, and is home to worms and other organisms. It feels soft, moist, and friable, and allows plant roots to grow unimpeded. Credit: Colette Kessler, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service

By Mantoe Phakathi
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Each year, 12 million hectares of land – where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown – are lost to degradation.

In fact, over the past four decades, one-third of the planet’s food-producing land has become unproductive due to erosion.

Here at the 38^th conference of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, countries led by the Kingdom of Thailand are calling for an International Year of Soils (IYS) in 2015 to raise the profile of this critical yet endangered resource.

Soil degradation is estimated to cost the global economy 70 dollars per person every year, according to Arni Mathiesen, FAO assistant director-general for aquaculture and fisheries.

Meanwhile, healthy soils provide an estimated 1.5 to 13 trillion dollars in ecosystem services annually.

But with a necessary 60-percent rise in global food production in coming decades, Mathiesen says there will be “further pressure on soils”. This can also worsen global warming, as erosion puts carbon back into the atmosphere.

Supporting the call for an IYS is Namibia’s director of Aquaculture and Inland Fisheries Dr. Moses Maurihungirire, who says soil conservation does not get the attention it deserves.

“There aren’t many experts working on soil compared to water and other natural resources,” Maurihungirire tells TerraViva. “This is part of the reason why soil is marginalised compared to other natural resources.”

Coming from a semi-arid country where a vast amount of land area is desert, Maurihungirire says extreme weather patterns driven by climate change are stripping the scarce topsoil that exists, leading to further desertification.

Also throwing its weight behind Thailand’s proposal is Brazil, which is taking the lead in the preservation of soil and creating awareness in the Latin American region as the founder of the Global Soil Partnership.

Luiz Maria Pio Corrba, the alternate representative of Brazil to FAO, says creating awareness on soil is critical to promote agricultural production.

“Without soil, there is no agriculture because soil provides the link to all natural resources,” he tells TerraViva.

Thaliland and FAO are also asking the United Nations system to officially recognise a World Soil Day on Dec. 5 to coincide with the birthday of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who is a soil scientist and has initiated programmes in his country aimed at soil preservation and rehabilitation.

Both proposals ultimately will have to be voted on by the U.N. General Assembly.

Nepal has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. Over 41 percent of the country’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition, predominantly in rural areas. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

In addition to the world’s 870 million hungry, many others are suffering from inadequate nutrition that does not allow them to live full lives, or find their fates highly vulnerable to price shifts on global food markets.

Published during FAO’s 38th biennial conference taking place Jun. 15-22 in Rome, Italy, the FAO Statistical Yearbook 2013 combines national statistics from all over the world to paint a global picture of food security and nutrition.

It is already well known that 12.5 percent of the world population, or 870 million people, were undernourished in 2010-2012, 852 million of whom live in developing countries.

Even though significant progress has been made in combating hunger over the past decade, the global economic crisis has put a break on this positive transformation in many places around the world.

While the focus of the first Millenium Development Goal is halving world hunger by 2015, FAO’s Yearbook draws attention to the need to look beyond the number of undernourished, to the number of those who suffer from “food inadequacy”. These are people who might not be considered undernourished under normal circumstances, but do live on a diet that prevents them from adequately conducting physical activities that require significant effort.

Countries such as Bangladesh, India, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Swaziland or Kenya have large populations suffering from food inadequacy while not being on the list of states where chronic undernourishment is widespread.

To take India as a case in point, undernourishment reached 17.4 percent in 2010-2012, or 217 million people, while the food inadequacy rate was 27.5 percent in the same period.

As many of the less-well-off people rely on physical work for survival, governments need to pay attention to this additional indicator, argues FAO.

The statistics compilation also makes it clear that increasing food production will not necessarily bring about a decrease in hunger, unless accompanied by other policies, as Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen stressed in his lecture kicking off the FAO Conference.

While in many countries and regions high food availability is positively correlated with proper nourishment, this is not necessarily the case everywhere. For instance, Egypt’s dietary supply adequacy (indicative of the caloric value of the food available in the country) is 45 percent more than what is deemed necessary for proper nutrition. Yet 31 percent of children under the age of five suffer from stunting, often the result of prolonged periods of inadequate nutrition.

Similar situations occur in Benin, Malawi, the Niger, Kazakhstan or Nicaragua, proving that ensuring adequate nutrition depends significantly on the ability to distribute available resources equitably, without allowing for pockets of poverty to be created.

The world’s poor are not only constantly struggling to meet their nutrition needs, but they are also the most likely to be affected by fluctuations of food prices. This is because the poor spend the highest share of their disposable incomes on food, making them very vulnerable to sudden food price increases or decreases in revenues.

The FAO Yearbook notes several countries around the world are particularly exposed to world food markets: Mexico when it comes to maize, the Philippines for rice, Egypt for wheat and bread.

In many places, food price increases have led to increased hunger rates over the past years: for instance, in Uganda, food prices increased by 25 percent between 2003-2005 and 2010-2012, which came together with a rise in undernourishment rates of 30 percent.

But this is not always the case: rising food prices brought reductions in hunger rates in countries such as China, Nepal and Pakistan. The difference is made by the extent to which the vulnerable populations are net food producers or consumers, and by national policies which may buffer domestic markets from price changes on international markets.

Nigeria -one of Africa’s most populous states and a major oil producer – learned hard lessons about under-investing in food security for its people: malnutrition went up; so did prices and corruption in the voucher system for farming inputs.

That is all in the past now, says Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Akinwumi Adesina, who credits political support for helping Nigeria halve the number of hungry people in the last two years. The country was one of the 38 nations recently awarded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for meeting Millennium Development Goal One on reducing hunger and extreme poverty, from 19.3 percent in 1990-1992 to 8.5 percent today, according to Adesina, who became agriculture minister in 2011.

Akinwumi Adesina, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nigeria. Credit: Busani Bafana/

“That means we have achieved the goal three years ahead of the schedule set for us,” he says. “Agriculture is the basis for making sure you have diversified and nutritious food.”

IPS’ Busani Bafana, asked Adesina –a trained economist and decorated food security advocate – about Nigeria’s new food fortunes. Excerpts from the interview follow:

BB: So what is your secret for turning the tide?

AA: We are using quite a lot of private sector investments to drive agriculture. Because at the end of the day, if you are a farmer and you have a lot of money, you cannot only buy supplementary food that you need but can also invest in housing, in sanitation and better nutrition for your kids.

BB: Political will comes with financial resources. Has Nigeria invested adequately in its agricultural productivity?

We made one fundamental paradigm shift on agriculture. Agriculture is not just a quantum of public sector funds that you put into agriculture, but agriculture is a business. In the last 18 months, we have been able to leverage about 8 billion dollars of private sector investment commitments in this. We are not looking at just increasing public finance, but also looking at leveraging a lot of private sector into agriculture, because agriculture is not a development programme.

BB: What challenges have you faced?

As minister of agriculture, my goal is to make sure that we are a net exporter of food. I am not satisfied that Nigeria has been importing food for a long time. We are already turning that around. We have produced 1.9 million metric tonne of rice in just one year. That is about 55 percent of what we need to be self-sufficient in rice by 2015. The secret: making sure that farmers get the inputs.

The challenge remains making sure that all farmers today get inputs and finance at affordable interest rates. Our President has approved that we recapitalise our Bank of Agriculture. We are using our own funds, not development funds, to leverage 3,5 billion dollars off the balance sheet of our banks for agriculture. Another thing is infrastructure, whether it is rural roads or making sure our irrigation facilities are well done.

BB: You launched a mobile facility for farmers to access vouchers. One of the reasons for this was to curb corruption. What impact has this made?

For 40 years fertilisers in Nigeria were bought and sold by government. As that happened, no more that 11 percent of the farmers were actually getting fertilizers and sometimes they were getting sand as fertiliser. This was creating a lot of disincentives for farmers.

At the start of his administration, and with Mr. President’s support, it actually took 90 days to end corruption of 40 years. We decided to reach our farmers directly with inputs and that is why we did the electronic wallet: farmers could get their inputs on time and we could target them.

Some people said farmers will not be able to use the mobile phones, but the fact that you do not speak English does not mean you are illiterate. Out of the 4.9 million transactions that were done by mobile phone last year, 2.2 million were done in Hausa and 1.8 million of them were actually done in the Pidgin language.

The impact has been massive. We cut out the corruption and cut out the middle men and saved government money. We saved 29 billion Naira [about 180 million dollars] just last year and that is money I would have [otherwise] signed away [to input suppliers] as Agriculture Minister.

Women farmers are taking the lead in managing leasehold forestry programmes in rural Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
JHIRUBAS, Nepal, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.

Pata and the roughly 200 other residents in the scenic yet sparse Dharkesingh village, part of the Jhirubas village development committee (VDC), live off the surrounding forests, in bright red, thatched-roof mud huts.

Jhirubas is the most remote of the 3,913 VDCs scattered across 75 districts in Nepal, but it shares with its counterparts a high level of underdevelopment, food insecurity and poverty.

The road infrastructure is very weak and often gets washed away in the monsoon rains, making transportation of food very difficult – in fact, over half the population suffers from inadequate food consumption. The nearest water source is a three-hour walk away.

These villagers have no illusions of living in grand circumstances; their humble dreams consist only of ensuring a decent future for their children. And with the help of a massive leasehold forestry programme, they are doing just that.

Great swathes of the forests that cover 40 percent of Nepal’s territory have been degraded, prompting the government to embark on a project in collaboration with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to convert wasted land into economic opportunities, officials at the Department of Forests (DoF) told IPS in the capital.

In 2005, a 12.7-million-dollar Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) took flight in 22 mid-hill districts, stretching from the country’s easternmost extremity to its western border, covering 28,000 hectares of forest land managed by nearly 6,000 forestry leasehold groups involving 58,000 households.

Four years later the government began pilot projects – led by the DoF, with technical inputs from the FAO and financial assistance from IFAD – in five districts including Jhirubas, where locals have converted degraded forest areas into the country’s largest broom grass plantations.

Locally known as ‘amresu’, the grass now covers 246 hectares of the 350-hectare region. The grass requires little water and thrives on steep slopes, preventing landslides and helping to remediate the soil.

By turning the flowers of the plant into traditional brooms, which are then sold to a local retailer, villagers earn the money required to stock up on food for the monsoon months when the roads in their landslide-prone village become impassable.

“In the last 12 months we earned about 3.5 million rupees (roughly 37,000 dollars) and the income is growing every year,” Navindra Thapa Magar, a local farmer and secretary of a leasehold forestry cooperative in the Kauledanda village of the Jhirubas VDC told IPS.

Each of the 246 households in the village earned about 150 dollars in 2012, income that has proved to be indispensable in supplementing villagers’ diets during the nine months out of the year when production of maize, wheat, potatoes, millet and green vegetables comes to a standstill.

Amresu leaves also provide fodder for livestock, and the stems provide fuel.

Women run the show

Households surviving on less than 80 dollars per year quickly stood out as the target population for the project, which promised each family a 40-year free lease of one hectare of land.

DoF and FAO officials provided support by training farmers and initiating a shift away from slash-and-burn practices, known locally as ‘khoriya farming’, towards more sustainable agro-forestry techniques, in which crops are interspersed with trees and other plants, ensuring a longer and healthier life for the entire ecosystem.

What officials had not anticipated, however, was the level of women’s participation in the project.

A wave of male migration out of Jhirubas over the last few decades had pushed women into the dual role of labourer-housekeeper.

Daman Singh Thapa, chairman of the Kaule leasehold forestry cooperative, told IPS that when the scheme spread to their remote village, women quickly took up the challenge of planting and harvesting the grass, working long hours on the steep slopes.

DoF Official Govinda Prasad Kafley added that every participating household now involves equal numbers of trained men and women, who share decision-making power.

While FAO experts say income generation has led to developments like the installation of water pipes, which relieve women of having to walk several kilometres each day in search of water, others worry that the burden of farming and business operations heaped on top of household chores and care of livestock might end up hurting rather than helping the community.

Forty-year-old Bom Bahadur Thapa told IPS that the work, which includes hand-clearing shrubs in order to plant the grass, and then hand-picking the flowers for the brooms, is backbreaking.

“Let’s hope that men become more involved, instead of leaving to look for work elsewhere,” she said.

Indeed, news of the project’s success has already gone viral, prompting migrant workers to return to their village after pictures of thriving broom grass plantations and the smiling faces of their families replaced images of hardship.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

To reduce the drudgery of harvesting and carrying brooms on their backs to the local collection centre, several farmers in the community recently pooled their resources to purchase a tractor, becoming the first leasehold forestry group in the country to do so.

With the grass providing plenty of fodder, livestock herds have increased four-fold from roughly two to three goats to an average of 12 goats per family, said Hasti Maya Bayambu, chairperson of a leasehold forestry group in Dharkesingh. The community is even considering selling the excess fodder to markets outside their village.

Following the success of broom grass plantations, impoverished families from the traditionally marginalised janjatis (indigenous) and dalit (low caste) groups have also embarked on commercial ventures, producing cardamom and ginger using agro-forestry techniques, according to Palpa District Forest Officer Suresh Singh.

But even while celebrating the project’s success, government officials are gearing up for the next big challenge: what to do when aid from the FAO and IFAD expires at the end of 2013, leaving farmers without technical inputs like free seeds, savings schemes and marketing trainings that are integral to the proper functioning of the micro-economy that has developed around the programme.

Narayan Bhattarai, the hub officer and key field officer of the pilot districts, told IPS that farmers rely greatly on the presence of fulltime field officers, who, in addition to arranging trips for officials and donor representatives, boost locals’ confidence in the project.

By the farmers’ own admission, it will take at least five years to attain full self-sufficiency. Unless donor agencies step up their efforts, the future of one of Nepal’s most successful rural development programmes hangs in the balance.

Irrigation canal, Mchinji. Credit: FISD/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Since food and water are so closely interlinked, there is a lingering fear based on the assumption, if there is no water, there will be no food.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) underlines the strong links between the two when it declares that agriculture accounts for over 70 percent of global water use.

Meanwhile, the share of water available for agriculture is expected to decline to 40 percent by 2050, warns an FAO report released here for the agency’s 38thsession, currently underway. “Water is becoming scarce not because the volume of water is reduced but because demand from society is increasing.” - Prof. Jan Lundqvist, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)

The figures are based on statistics released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The availability of fresh water resources shows a similar picture to that of land: sufficient resources at the global level are unevenly distributed, and an increasing number of countries, or parts of countries, are reaching critical levels of water scarcity, according to FAO.

The FAO also says many of the water-scarce countries in the Near East and North Africa, and in South Asia, further lack land resources.

Due to their vulnerability, coastal areas, the Mediterranean basin, the North East and North African countries and dry Central Asia appear as locations where investment in water management techniques should be considered a priority when promoting agricultural productivity growth.

Asked if the link between agricultural productivity and water scarcity is real, Prof. Jan Lundqvist, senior scientific advisor at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told IPS, “Yes and No”.

If there is no water (e.g. in deserts), food cannot be produced, he pointed out. But water is a renewable resource and the hydrological cycle, which is driven by the sun, will continue also in the future.

The amount of renewable freshwater in terms of precipitation falling over the continents is about 110,000 km3 per year, he said. But with an increasing population, the amount of water per capita is inevitably reduced.

It is increasingly difficult, costly and dangerous, according to Lundqvist, to divert more water from rivers and lakes and to pump water from groundwater reserves.

“At the same time, with economic development, the per-capita demand increases. It is, indeed, a tricky equation,” he noted.

Since everything humans eat requires water to be produced, the paradox of the “water we eat” was best illustrated by an exhibition at a SIWI conference last year, which pointed out that the production of an average hamburger – two slices of bread, beef, tomato, lettuce, onions and cheese – consumes about 2,389 litres of water, compared to 140 litres for a cup of coffee and 135 for a single egg.

An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water while a chunky, succulent beef steak, a staple among the rich in the world’s industrial countries, consumes one of the largest quantum of water: about 7,000 litres.

Vincent Casey, technical support manager at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS that irrigated agriculture accounts for the vast majority of water withdrawals in many countries.

A great deal can be done to prevent water scarcity through changes to thirsty agricultural practices.

Crop types, irrigation methods and water tariffs can be changed to reduce demand. These actions require political commitment, which can be difficult to get, he noted.

Two things are required for water security: well-managed water resources and well-managed water supply services (pumps, pipes taps, storage tanks).

Water scarcity is already a daily reality for over 760 million people right now – not because irrigation farmers are drinking all of their water, Casey said, but because of a lack of the water supply services required to make use of available water.

“If we didn’t have reservoirs, pipes and taps in the UK, we would be water scarce too”.

Management of the water supply crisis will involve demand management in areas where there is pressure on the resource, he added, and supply management where people lack any kind of access to water — not because it isn’t there but because it requires investment to develop it.

If there is a scarcity of water, Lundqvist told IPS, food production will be a victim for two main reasons.

Firstly, other sectors will require a large share of water supply. With urbanization both industry and households will be able to articulate their demands and they are in a better position to pay for additional water.

“Water is becoming scarce not because the volume of water is reduced but because demand from society is increasing,” he said.

A second reason is that precipitation pattern will be more stochastic as a result of global warming. Risk will increase for farmers, since uncertainty will increase.

This is particularly problematic, he pointed out, for rain-fed agriculture. But with an increasing frequency and amplitude of droughts and floods, and with the increasing demands from other sectors, the timing of supplies for irrigation during the agricultural seasons will be more tricky.

Higher temperature will speed up the return flow of water back to atmosphere with complications for the farmers.

Under these circumstances –and considering the fact that enough food is produced to feed the entire world population properly– it will be crucial, he said, to make sure that the food produced is beneficially used to the degree feasible and reaches the consumers, including the poor.

Between one-third and half of the food produced is lost, wasted or converted. This means a tremendous waste of resources.

“We must walk on two legs into the future, ensure that enough is produced and make sure that the produce is accessed and used in a most worthwhile manner,” he declared.

The real predicament is regional. The population continues to increase in many areas where water availability is already quite limited.

Even more challenging: the rainfall pattern is becoming more unreliable, while temperature is increasing, he noted.

There will thus be seasons and periods when a growing number of people will experience prolonged droughts (they may last over several years) while in other places, floods will have devastating consequences, he warned.

Water scarcity features among FAO's five new strategic objectives. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East and North Africa is the region most affected by water scarcity in the world, and for the moment, the situation seems set to worsen.

“In Yemen, we do not have many sources of fresh water and rain water is certainly not enough for our needs,” Gunid Ali Abdullah, planning director at Yemen’s Ministry of Agriculture, tells TerraViva in Rome. “We are all the time having to dig deeper and deeper to get water from aquifers.”"The potential of the region is not being met." -- FAO's Mohamed Bazza

In Yemen’s capital Sana’a, tap water is rationed, and farmers close to the city have deepened their wells by tens of metres over the past decade but are nevertheless extracting less water than before.

Yemen is certainly not unique in a region where per capita water consumption in many countries stands well below the U.N.’s water scarcity mark of 1,000 cubic metres yearly. To compare, the global water consumption average is above 6,000 cubic metres.

Countries in the region are already tapping non-replenishable water resources, or fossil aquifers.

“At the end of this year, we should be able to start using water coming from the Al-Disi Basin, at the border with Saudi Arabia, which we hope will come a long way in meeting the needs of our capital, Amman, which hosts 3.5 million people, almost half of our total population,” Feisal Alargan, deputy permanent representative of Jordan to FAO, tells TerraViva.

The Al-Disi aquifer is thought to be about 320 kilometres long, the largest of its type in the Arabian peninsula. It has already been exploited by Saudi Arabia, and its resources are thought to be non-renewable.

Jordan is ranked third in the world when it comes to water scarcity, relying mostly on rain and underground water as well as on a supply quota of the river Jordan agreed with Israel.

In such conditions, figuring out how to use non-replenishable water resources, despite the unsustainability of the solution and despite some doubts over the quality of the water, seems like a miraculous way out for Jordanian leaders and others in the region.

Yet such approaches resemble a race to the bottom: a NASA report published in March this year showed that, between 2003 and 2009, the Middle East lost a quantity of water equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.

And things might get worse: the World Bank predicts that water demand in the region is expected to grow by 60 percent by 2045.

The region’s water problems are caused by a natural lack of water resources combined, according to experts, with poor management of the existing resources at both the national level and regionally.

The lack of intra-regional cooperation is most noticeable when it comes to sharing water from transboundary rivers: outdated accords make it so that Egypt uses most of the Nile’s potential; Turkey, upstream from other countries on the course of the Euphrates and the Tigris, is sucking up most valuable resources via its intensive use of dams; the use of river Jordan remains an issue of controversy between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries.

Governments in the region are of course struggling to find solutions to the problem of water scarcity.

“We’re working on the construction of small dams in the highlands in order to harvest water,” explains Yemen’s Gunid Ali Abdullah. “We’re also trying to modernise irrigation methods in order to use less water for agriculture, which currently takes up about 90 percent of our precious water resources.”

But the challenges are high and cooperation is key to overcoming water scarcity in the region.

International organisations have been trying to tackle water issues in the region in the past with technical assistance programmes and grants, with limited success.

This year, the U.N. FAO is attempting to change the approach to the issue: throughout 2013, it is conducting a thorough assessment of water resources and use in the whole region, trying both to treat the region as a whole and to pay close attention to the multiple interactions between water and all other aspects of human life.

“The Near East region has to meet half of its food needs via imports because of lack of water to produce enough food itself,” explains Mohamed Bazza, FAO’s focal point for national drought policies.

Bazza stresses that the central role of water for achieving food security makes water scarcity issues crucial for FAO, which explains why water scarcity features among the five new strategic objectives to be pursued by the institution.

“Numerous efforts have been made in the past to improve food security in the region on different aspects, including water use, but something has not been working, meaning that the potential of the region is not being met,” Bazza says.

FAO’s comprehensive assessment will this year look for the reasons behind the region’s water crisis, as well as try to identify what should be priority areas of action to address these problems.

Solutions not emphasised much until now could become more prominent: for instance, shifting  agricultural production towards less water-intensive crops or even reducing food waste on the fields as wasted crops also mean wasted water.

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez highlights continuing inequality in Latin America. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Julio Godoy
ROME, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

Judging by the accolades and diplomas handed out to 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries by FAO, it would be easy to conclude that the region has taken a giant leap towards eradicating hunger.

This is the benign face of the fight against hunger in Latin America, together with the strong economic growth experienced by many countries in the region.

But a closer look at the food and agriculture scenario reveals another side: lingering inequality, marked by the increasing influence of agribusiness, in which a few giant corporations wield enormous control and power.

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez, head of the FAO office for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that “although our continent has made great strides against hunger, it is still the most unequal region in the world.”

“Of the nearly 900 million hungry people in the world, 50 million are in Latin America or the Caribbean,” Benítez told IPS at the 38th FAO Conference meeting in Rome Jun. 15-22.

Hunger has even reared its head once again in countries like Argentina, whose population was among the best-fed on the planet for a considerable part of the 20th century.

“Today in Argentina there are many children suffering from malnutrition caused by the soy boom,” complained Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC), referring to Argentina’s top export.

“For more than 20 years, with the support of every administration, Argentina has allowed massive expansion of soy cultivation, displacing cattle as well as other crops, and even transforming the local diet,” said Ribeiro, whose organisation monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporations on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights.

Today, “the poor in Argentina don’t drink cow’s milk but soy milk, and they don’t eat beef but soy substitutes, a monotonous diet that causes malnutrition,” she said.

According to Ribeiro, who is also at the Rome conference, FAO’s praise for Latin America’s achievements against hunger “is based on a biased and misleading analysis.”

“It’s as if FAO only saw GDP, which does reflect greater agricultural production, but closed its eyes to the fact that this production is socially excluding and ecologically unsustainable, and only benefits big multinational corporations that produce for export,” she said.

But Benítez said “FAO can only call attention to these phenomena and propose corrective measures; states are sovereign, and they may or may not adopt policies in line with our proposals.”

Ribeiro also highlighted the increasing use of genetically modified crops. “The most serious case is that of Mexican maize, because the government has approved (experimental plots) of transgenic maize seeds by companies like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer,” the activist said.

Maize is an essential staple in the diet of the people of Mesoamerica, the region encompassing southern Mexico and Central America. Moreover, Mexico “is the birthplace” of maize, Ribeiro noted. In this country, “maize is more than food, it is an essential pillar of national identity and tradition,” she added.

Countries in similar positions, such as China in the case of soy, and parts of southeast Asia in the case of rice, prohibit the cultivation of transgenic varieties to safeguard their biological heritage, said Ribeiro. “Mexico should follow their lead with maize,” she argued.

Recent research has found that transgenic maize may be harmful to health. “A group of French scientists has shown that transgenic maize causes cancer in rats,” said Ribeiro.

“Another study, for the European Food Safety Authority, discovered that most of the transgenic varieties approved for commercial use in the United States (54 out of 86) contain virus genetic material that was not observed when they were approved, and may have harmful effects in plants, animals and people,” she said.

“At FAO we are aware that land grabbing and large agribusiness concerns can cause social exclusion and be environmentally unsustainable,” said Benítez. “Governments must weigh the short-term benefits against the long-term costs, which may be much higher, and make decisions accordingly.”

Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

“We do believe that it’s perfectly possible to end extreme poverty in Brazil by 2015,” Antonino Marques Porto, Brazil’s ambassador to FAO, tells TerraViva in Rome.

Brazil is currently implementing the Brasil Sem Miséria programme — a continuation of the successful Fome Zero— which aims to do just that, Marques Porto says. Initiated in 2003 by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fome Zero is credited with having taken 30 to 40 million Brazilians out of poverty.

“It involved among others cash transfers to the poorest families, conditioned on children going to school and getting vaccines,” the ambassador says,” but also rural credits and investments in small farms.”

One of the core actions of the programme was providing poor children with free school lunches, which were purchased by the state from family farms. In this way, support to local small farmers was provided at the same time as offering quality nutrition to children from low-income families.

According to Marques Porto, supporting family farms – which currently provide 70 percent of the food eaten by Brazilians – is central to poverty alleviation.

The success of Fome Zero was due to three elements, thinks Oxfam International’s Luca Chinotti: the strong leadership provided by President Lula; the broad partnership involved in devising and implementing the platform, which included ministries, civil society, representatives of small farmers and rural workers; and shifting most public sector food purchases to family farm suppliers.

Brazil is sharing its experience with family farm produce purchases for poverty alleviation with other countries around the world, as part of the World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress framework, says Marques Porto.

Over the past decade, Brazil has been deriving much of its wealth from food exports. Yet its large-scale soy and beef production for export are also responsible for deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Amazonian region. Furthermore, clearing of land for industrial agriculture is threatening livelihoods of local communities.

“Across the world, rural communities rely on land, forests and fisheries for their food security,” says Oxfam’s Chinotti. “If policies and projects reduce their access to those natural resources, the outcome will be more hunger.”

Last year, FAO published a set of “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security”, offering guidance to countries around the world on just systems of tenure, that are compatible with every person’s right to adequate food

Oxfam and other NGOs are now calling on all countries around the world to implement those guidelines in order to secure smallholders’ access to land and natural resources.

This year, the U.N.’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda proposed that clear targets on land tenure are included in the development framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. If adopted, such targets could play an important role in preventing land grabbing and protecting the food security of local communities.

The world today faces a rather stunning paradox. We produce enough to feed seven billion people, but high prices and other factors have pushed adequate nutrition out of reach for more than one in 10, says Maria Helena Semedo, deputy director general-knowledge at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). 

Speaking during the 38th conference of FAO in Rome on Monday, Semedo also points out that between 30 and 50 percent of the food produced globally is not consumed.

As FAO member states ponder the next move after the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MGD) come to an end in 2015, Semedo believes that hunger can indeed be eradicated in the coming decade – by 2025.

“The challenge is to ensure that the poor have the means to obtain the food they need at reasonable cost and in times of crisis,” she says.

Linda Collette, Secretary, Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

One of the first MDG targets is to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015, an achievement many developing countries will not realise, according to the 2012 FAO report, the State of Food Insecurity in the World.

Semedo says there is a need to shift to more sustainable food production and consumption patterns because some countries, in Africa, for instance, produce little of what they eat, instead relying on pricier, more volatile imports.

In the end, smallholder farmers, women and youth will be the critical agents of change in achieving MDG One and economic development, Semedo says. “They are not the problem but the solution.”

As the continent with the highest proportion of malnourished people – 23 percent – Africa has come up with a clear strategy through its New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

Two-thirds of the continent’s population is also under the age of 35, and NEPAD’s CEO Dr. Ibrahim Mayaki says agriculture can drive economic development to help create employment opportunities.

But there is a need to create stronger linkages among various sectors, including health, education, science and technology, to drive the post-2015 development agenda, he says.

“The main single message from Africa is that the post-2015 agenda is structural economic transformation,” says Mayaki.

NEPAD provides the critical framework and context to structure the thinking, strategies and priorities for Africa’s thrust on the post-MDG era, he says.

“It can’t be done without agriculture and food security,” Mayaki adds.

Africa’s message seems to be in line with FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva’s vision “of an interconnected and yet peaceful, fair and culturally diverse world,”  that guarantees all human beings their fundamental right to food and a life free from hunger and malnutrition.

To realise this vision, he urges member states to ensure that sustainable agriculture and food security nourishes people and nurtures the planet.

Conservation agriculture has improved Zimbabwean farmer Catherine Dube's maize yields. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
HWANGE, Zimbabwe, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

For Catherine Dube, it is a good time to catch up on village happenings and sing-alongs when she meets with neighbours to dig basins in each other’s fields in preparation for the planting season.

The camaraderie of sharing the labour and sometimes seeds characterises the annual hoeing of neatly spaced deep basins, a technique Dube says has improved her crop yields since she adopted it four years ago.

Though the holes dug 15 cm deep by 15 cm wide look ordinary, they are not. Dube sprinkles fertiliser, using a soft drink bottle top as a measure. She throws three hybrid maize seeds into each basin, then covers it halfway with dry soil.

When the first rains fall, water collects in the basin, providing moisture for the plant for many weeks until the next rains come.

The practise of digging such basins is known as conservation agriculture — others call it “farming God’s way”.

The Zimbabwe station of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Matopos, about 30 km south of Bulawayo, actively promotes conservation farming.

The technique is helping an estimated 300,000 Zimbabwean farmers like Dube feed their families and even have surplus grain to sell.

“Conservation agriculture has improved my crop production,” Dube tells TerraViva during a walk around her plot in Jambezi ward in Hwange District, 300 kms north of Bulawayo.

Adopted by thousands of farmers in Zimbabwe to boost yields and save their soils from erosion, conservation agriculture involves three main principles: planting crops with minimum disturbance of the soil; mulching with crop wastes, cover crops or other organic matter; and growing crops such as cereals and legumes in rotation.

The process entails zero ploughing and massive carting in of manure, and farmers say making the basins is hard work when the soil is dry.

Dr. Kizito Mazvimavi, a scientist with ICRISAT, says preparing planting basins using hand hoes before the onset of the rainy season allowed smallholder farmers without access to draft power to plant with the first rains.

“The basins also allow for precision application of the often limited fertiliser and harvesting of rain water early in the season,” Mazvimavi says.

ICRISAT has promoted conservation agriculture and micro-dosing techniques in semi-arid regions of the world, including Zimbabwe, with funding from the UK Department for International Development ‘s Protracted Relief Programme.

According to Mazvimavi, farmers adopting the technology have realised yield gains of 15 to 100 percent across different agro-ecological regions.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) profiles conservation agriculture in a report titled “Partnering for Results”. It details 29 stories from member countries around the world, and was released at the 38th session of the FAO biennial conference in Rome this week.

“While only five percent of Zimbabwe’s maize-growing area is currently under conservation agriculture, those farmers who have adopted it have been able to harvest more from their small plots, averaging about two tonnes per hectare of maize, which is nearly triple what they produced under conventional agriculture,” the report says.

In its initial stages, conservation agriculture is more labour-intensive than conventional methods, so the FAO launched a programme of training and demonstration. It also introduced labour-saving mechanical planters to win over sceptical farmers.

“Once farmers pass the initial labour-intensive, start-up seasons, their conservation agriculture techniques cut down on waste of inputs and thus reduce their costs,” the report says.

But critics like researcher and agricultural ecologist Ian Scoones warn that conservation agriculture may not be appropriate for every area. For example, although 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s farmers are smallholders, some of the new resettlements involve farms averaging five to 10 ha, where such a labour-intensive technique would not be a good fit.

“In a new agrarian setting, there are some real technological challenges, but these will have to be met together with inputs from farmers and a much better sense of scale requirements and farmer needs and priorities,” he concludes.

Ambassador and Permanent Representative of France to FAO H.E. Bérengére Quincy. Credit: ©FAO/Alessandra Benedetti

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Closing the gender gap between women and men on agriculture and food security could free over one hundred million people from hunger. 

Women represent 43 percent of the global agricultural workforce yet they have access to disproportionately less land and productive resources, according to FAO’s report The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-2011.

Not only are they discriminated against in terms of access to credit and land, but they also are burdened with more house and family care chores and are more likely to be in precarious and low-paid employment.

During this week’s biannual conference in Rome, FAO announced the mainstreaming of gender across all its policies and put its gender policy for discussion in front of the national delegations.“In order to close the gender gap, it is not enough to adopt the gender lens." - ActionAid International’s Alberta Guerra

Observers of FAO’s work on gender argue that the organisation has made very good progress over the past years, and that the basic necessary documents and normative frameworks needed for closing the gender gap are now in place.

But care must now be paid to implementation.

“Gender mainstreaming is necessary but not a guarantee,” Berengere Quincy, France’s representative to FAO, tells TerraViva. “The mainstreaming needs to be backed up by better knowledge and expertise and followed up with clear objectives and indicators of progress.”

In many places around the world, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen pointed out in his speech given in Rome at the kickoff of the FAO biannual conference, women are also discriminated against when it comes to nutrition, with men systematically getting the best food. In turn, this weakens women’s chances of meeting their full potential.

FAO’s report quoted above further points out that granting women equal access to land and resources as men would increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which in turn would lead to raising agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to four percent and saving 100 to 150 million people from malnourishment.

In response to these realities – and to pressures from civil society – FAO has over the past two years made significant progress on turning itself into an organisation focused on closing the gender gap when it comes to food security.

The 2010-2011 State of Food and Agriculture report was for the first time focused on women’s role in the global food system. Importantly, it brought quantitative data to support the idea that empowering women contributes significantly to FAO’s mission of defeating hunger, which in turn contributed to gender issues being embraced across FAO departments.

In 2012, the organisation published a Gender Policy which aims to both prioritise gender issues in the FAO’s own structure and programmes and to increase capacities for promoting gender equality in the countries where FAO operates.

Several countries (Switzerland, Norway and the United States) as well as the European Union warned that clear targets and implementation mechanisms, alongside a sufficient budget, are crucial to add to the current plans if FAO is serious about gender equality.

This year’s conference is expected to endorse a budget for 2014/2015 that would leave the amounts for gender issues unchanged from the previous budget period 2013/2014, that is, 21.8 million dollars.

This amount represented a doubling of the 9.8 million dollars corresponding to the 2010/2011 following pressures of gender rights supporters within and outside FAO, and represents a 2.1 percent of the overall net appropriation. Over the next years, FAO is expected to set a target for gender spending which could even exceed the 2.1 percent.

ActionAid International’s Alberta Guerra, whose group has been advocating for a gender policy and gender mainstreaming at FAO for years, says that it is important that the organisation keeps up the momentum of promoting gender equality.

That would mean paying attention to implementation of the current commitments and making sure that a solid budget comes together with the objectives stated out in the policy documents.

“In order to close the gender gap, it is not enough to adopt the gender lens. It is essential that, in addition to that, interventions that target, specifically, women’s needs are put into place,” Guerra says.

“The policy is very forward looking. It’s not just a policy for FAO, but a policy for its members, a policy which tries to set objectives and goals that everyone concerned about food and agriculture is trying to achieve,” says Eve Crowley, FAO deputy director for gender, equity and rural development.

“It’s important to build a momentum around these objectives and goals among all stakeholders.”

Nabi Ahmed, a dairy farmer from Aliabad in the Narowal district of Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, with his cows. Credit: Muhammad Hadi/IPS

By Busani Bafana
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

The world can satisfy its growing appetite for meat and animal-based products without upsetting livelihoods, especially of developing country farmers, or worsening climate change.

This is the thinking behind the new multi-sectoral Global Agenda of Action (GAA) launched by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The initiative being promoted during the FAO’s 38th conference in Rome supports the development of a sustainable livestock sector that provides farmers with income, food and value-added products."We have to develop business models, because livestock is a business for livestock farmers." -- FAO Assistant Director-General Ren Wang

“What is the future of the developing country farmers, especially smallholder farmers?” asks FAO Assistant Director-General Ren Wang.

“In my view and that of FAO, the future is to increase the opportunities for profit, improving productivity and efficiency. We cannot leave smallholder farmers at subsistence level. We have to develop business models, because livestock is a business for livestock farmers.”

Wang tells TerraViva that the GAA will help smallholder farmers to improve the quality, efficiency and competitiveness of their products in the face of concerns about the environmental impacts of providing meat, milk and other animal products.

According to FAO, about one billion people worldwide depend on livestock, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where livestock provides up to 40 percent of agricultural gross domestic product but the sector only gets three percent of international development funding.

“Governments should do more to provide services and ensure that these services are enhanced to support livelihoods while ensuring sustainability for both the farmers and the environment,” says Wang. “There is a role for multilateral organisations such as the FAO, which can help in developing and implementing guidelines so that quality standards go up.”

A 2006 FAO study says livestock operations account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities. The calculation included the effects of deforestation, food production and its chemical inputs, gases produced by livestock, meat processing and agricultural transport.

Scientists estimate that methane has a global warming potential 23 times more potent than that of carbon dioxide and call for better ways of managing livestock production by increasing efficiencies.

“The livestock sector is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and by improving efficiency, especially input use efficiency, we can effectively mitigate the effects of the emissions in the livestock sector,” Wang says.

The GAA seeks improvements in natural resource use efficiency. Land, water, nutrients and greenhouse gas emissions are its initial focus.

The focus area of restoring value to grasslands pursues better management of grazing land, which contributes to carbon sequestration, protection of water resources and biodiversity, whilst enhancing productivity and livelihoods. The third focus of the GAA is on recovering energy and nutrients from animal manure to protect the environment.

“Much of our activities and focus is to work with developing countries where there are opportunities for big gains in livestock production which affect livelihoods, natural resources and the environment,” says Niel Fraser, chair of the Guiding Group providing the backup support for the Global Agenda for Action.

“There are gains to be made in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases from livestock production and that is what we want to encourage.”

The president of the Brazilian Roundtable on Sustainable Livestock, Eduardo Bastos, told a panel discussion on the Global Agenda for Action that Brazil – home to more than 60 million head of cattle – was on track to reduce its carbon emissions by 29 percent and was also restoring 15 hectares of depleted pastureland in the drive towards sustainable production.

“We are reducing deforestation and increasing our herds… as we believe you can increase beef production without cutting a tree,” Bastos says.

India is home to 25 percent of the World’s Hungry. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

As India’s Parliament prepares to pass a bill to provide heavily subsidised food to 810 million people, there are misgivings over its implementation through a notoriously corrupt public distribution system (PDS).

The National Food Security Bill will be debated and passed at a specially convened session of parliament, ahead of the regular monsoon session that begins mid-July.

"Villages (are) building community grain banks and becoming food secure. All that the government has to do is support and foster local self-help groups and replicate this model." -- Devinder Sharma
Opposition legislators will not stop the bill’s passage, but they are already criticising its high cost – estimated at 23 billion dollars annually – as an attempt to win cheap popularity for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in an election year.

Critics of the bill include members of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party as well as India’s communist parties in the Left Front, with the latter demanding that all of India’s 1.2 billion people be covered under a revamped ‘universal PDS’.

“We want amendments to the bill to ensure that there are no leakages through the creation of bogus categories of people such as those living below the poverty line and those living above it,”  D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), told IPS.

According to Raja, while India certainly needs a food security law, implementing it through the existing PDS will only provide more opportunities for corrupt traders and officials to siphon out money from a dysfunctional system.

Government reports have shown that at least 50 percent of the grain channeled through the PDS – consisting essentially of a network of  50,000 fair price shops – is cornered by traders who then either sell the same grain in the open market at high profits, or export it.

Traders have even been caught selling subsidised grain right back to the government’s procurement agents in connivance with corrupt officials of the state-run Food Corporation of India.

“What is needed is a strengthening of the existing PDS which has become notorious for leakages that have been working to deny poor people access to food, defeating the purpose for which it was created,” Raja said.

That India needs to overhaul its PDS is painfully obvious from the fact that each year its granaries overflow with bumper harvests of wheat and rice, which are allowed to rot in the rain while large numbers of people go hungry.

Over the last decade, the average food grain surplus every year has been around 60 million tonnes. In 2012, the surplus stood at 82.3 million tonnes and this year, with a favourable monsoon underway, a 90 million-tonne surplus is predicted.

The government deals with the surpluses by allowing exports – about 10 million tonnes each of wheat and rice were exported last year – a practice that left-wing politicians and food security experts criticise as unconscionable when thousands of Indians go hungry.

Resolving the paradox of starvation amidst plenty has become a priority, what with India finding itself castigated by the World Food Programme of the United Nations for being home to 25 percent of the world’s hungry.

According to a 2012 report by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has lagged in improving its Global Hunger Index (GHI) rating despite strong economic growth.

In India, 43.5 percent of children under five are underweight, giving it an unenviable GHI ranking of 65 among 79 countries surveyed. From 2005 to 2010, India ranked below Ethiopia, Niger, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

The new bill aims to rectify that situation by distributing some 50 million tonnes of grain to 360 million people, categorised as living below the poverty line, at about 10 percent of prices prevailing in the open market.

According to the World Bank, 32.7 percent of Indians live below the international poverty line of 1.25 dollars per day while another 68.7 percent live on less than two dollars per day.

But India’s Planning Commission places the poverty line far lower than the international level and calculates it at a pitiable 28.65 rupees (about five cents) worth of daily consumption per head in the cities and 22.42 rupees (four cents) in the rural areas.

“People at such a low level of consumption are not just poor they are in need of emergency food aid,” says Devinder Sharma, one of India’s best-known food security experts and leader of the respected Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.

Sharma told IPS that it would be impossible to sustain the massive feeding programme envisaged in the bill for more than a few years. “It really does look as if the new policy is designed with a view to win votes in general elections due in May 2014.”

Sharma blames the phenomenon of hunger in India on colossal mismanagement and consistently poor policies. “How else can you explain the paradox of hunger existing for years alongside exports and rotting grain?”

According to Sharma, the government should be addressing hunger through a community approach that builds capacities to become self-reliant rather than depending on doles and subsidies from the government.

“There are many examples of villages building community grain banks and becoming food secure. All that the government has to do is support and foster local self-help groups and replicate this model,” Sharma said.

India should be focusing its efforts on rejuvenating agriculture through a programme aimed at restoring soil fertility, reviving groundwater levels, and stopping the destruction of rich natural resources through unsustainable farming practices.

Most importantly, farmers need to be assured a monthly income. “Since farmers generate wealth in the form of agricultural commodities they should be adequately compensated rather than driven to suicide in droves.”

Sharma believes that India’s farmers have suffered as a result of agricultural imports under World Trade Organisation rules and free trade agreements. “For example, it is senseless to flood the country with duty-free imported edible oils when Indian farmers are capable of meeting the country’s needs.”

Schoolgirls in an Amazon community. In Peru, the indigenous children of the High Andes and Amazon regions are among the most malnourished in the world. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Since its founding in 2007 to help developing nations fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease and gender discrimination, the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F) has financed about 130 joint programmes in 50 countries.

Regina Gallego of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the lead agency overseeing the MDGs, told IPS the Fund’s nutrition programme alone has helped draft or revise some 25 national nutrition plans, encouraged the planting of 270 school and community gardens, and improved health access for about 534,000 citizens.

“Directly or indirectly, our contribution has improved the nutritional status of more than 900,000 children and 179,000 pregnant and breast-feeding mothers,” said Gallego, UNDP’s knowledge management specialist.

The 700-million-dollar MDG-F is a collaborative effort between the government of Spain and the U.N. system involving several agencies, both in headquarters and in the field.

The funding is focused on eight themes: children, food security and nutrition; gender equality and women’s empowerment; environment and climate change; youth employment and migration; democratic economic governance; development and the private sector; conflict prevention and peace building; and culture and development.

Raul de Mora Jimenez, communications specialist at UNDP, told IPS the Fund is actively assisting several countries worldwide.

For example, it is currently working to improve conditions for indigenous people in Brazil, where four out of 10 live in extreme poverty and more than half of the children are anemic.

The Eco-stoves Initiative is part of the joint U.N. programme “Promoting Food Security and Nutrition for Indigenous Children in Brazil”, a collaboration between the Brazilian government and five U.N. agencies aimed at improving food security and the nutritional status of native populations in the areas of Dourados and Alto Rio Solimões.

The five agencies are the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UNDP.

In Peru, the indigenous children of the High Andes and Amazon regions are among the most malnourished in the world: up to half of them suffer from chronic malnutrition and many are anemic and Vitamin A deficient.

This Joint Programme is supporting the Peruvian government’s effort to improve food security and nutrition in four of the country’s poorest regions by accelerating implementation of the national strategy titled CRECER.

In Ethiopia, nutrition has improved for children under five, Jimenez said, but the rate of progress must accelerate if the country is to achieve the MDG target of halving by 2015 the number of people who suffer from hunger.

Toward this end, the Ethiopian government has developed a National Nutrition Strategy and National Nutrition Programme, which form the framework for the MDG-F Joint Programme.

In Vietnam, the programme is focused on improving food security through increased production and consumption of quality food and targeted supplementation.
This is both a short-term strategy to address current issues of malnutrition – through breast-feeding, iron and vitamin A supplements – and a long-term strategy to provide a higher quality diet through improved food production systems, including animal (meat and milk) and aquaculture products.

Asked about funding for the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger by the 2015 deadline, Galego told IPS the general trends of the MDGs indicators show that despite the progress made, eradicating extreme hunger is still a challenge.

About 850 million people, or nearly 15 percent of the global population, are estimated to be undernourished, while one in five children under age five in the developing world is underweight.

Food security is starting to gain ground in the national agendas in a systematic and structured way, she added.

She said the MDG-F programmes have drawn some lessons about key issues to be taken into account, so that the target of reducing by 50 percent those living in extreme hunger can be reached.

A link between food security and nutrition needs to be forged to realise the Zero Hunger Challenge.

To ensure that people not only have enough food, but also sufficiently nutritious food, it is necessary to acknowledge the inextricable link between food security and nutrition security, Gallego said.

“In other words, not just the quantity of the food must be considered, but also other aspects such as its nutritious value and accessibility as well as the health status, socio-economic status and level of knowledge of the population,” she said.

The experience of the MDG-F has proved that multi-sectorial interventions, when applied in a coordinated manner, are more efficient in achieving results.

The key for success is to customise the design of the multi-sectorial interventions by selecting the most relevant sectors, taking into account the specific conditions of the targeted population, including cultural realities, political interests, and involved stakeholders, she added.

The combination package might include sectors such as health, education, agriculture, water, sanitation or energy sectors, among others, Gallego said.

The MDGs, which were formally approved by the General Assembly in September 2000 and launched a year later, expire in 2015.

But since the overwhelming majority of the 132 developing nations have not met their targets, the General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting in September this year to take stock of the successes and failures – and how best to proceed.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is negotiating a new set of goals – Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), described as a successor to MDGs – which will be part of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva addresses delegates and heads of state at the 38th FAO Conference. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Stella Paul
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

World food production in developing regions soared by up to 40 percent over the past decade, yet nearly a billion people continued to live with chronic hunger. 

To bridge this gap, there is an urgent need to strengthen the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation’s budget, says FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva, addressing an assembly of delegates and heads of state at the 38^th session of FAO’s biannual conference.

“If we keep looking at hunger from the point of food production alone, the problem will not get solved. We also need to improve the entire system, including the partnership with other stakeholders. It is time for us, therefore, to take the next step, which is improving the budget,” says Da Silva, adding that over the past 20 years, the FAO budget has lost 27 percent of its value.

Not all member states concur with the request – especially the largest donor countries. But Da Silva expressed hope that during the course of this week, a consensus will be reached on increasing the budgetary allocation of FAO, thus enabling the U.N. agency to better fight hunger across the world and help increase countries’ ability to ensure food security.

“We had a good start over the weekend with an inspiring lecture from Professor Amartya Sen and recognising countries that have met hunger targets. I am hopeful that the week ahead will be a constructive one,” the director general said.

The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant-Director General for Economic and Social Development, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Alessia Pierdomenico

After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a great deal to increase agricultural, especially food production. In the second half of the 20th century, agricultural productivity rose rapidly. But intense price competition reduced food prices, with consumers benefitting more from productivity gains – thus helping to reduce poverty.

Meanwhile, transnational agri-business has profited greatly from innovations in agricultural production, credit, processing and marketing value chains in recent decades.

More recently, food prices have gone up again as productivity and production have risen more slowly than before, partly due to reduced public investments in recent decades, slower productivity increases in the last decade, as well as recent increases in demand for food crops.

Recent food price increases have been associated not only with significant supply and demand changes, but also with biofuel mandates and subsidies as well as much greater commodity speculation.

In the unlikely event that food prices go down again after the recent increases since 2006, food would become more affordable, while reducing farmer incomes and the incentive to produce more food, which could eventually cause food prices to rise once again.

Fiscal redistribution?

Poor countries are doubly handicapped by their limited tax capacities, resulting in low tax rates on low incomes. While there is little excessive taxation of small farmers these days, there are also modest urban-to-rural resource transfers through the fiscal system or other transfer arrangements.

Government spending to raise agricultural output, productivity and incomes has also been shaped by political considerations, especially the desire to secure rural political support. However, with a few notable exceptions, government spending on agriculture is rarely biased to the poor.

While agricultural taxation is generally proportional to land owned or to output, such public expenditure tends to benefit the relatively better-off in agriculture with much rural spending benefiting plantations and larger farmers more than smaller smallholders, tenants or sharecroppers.

This is generally also true of improved rural infrastructure or social services, including health and schooling, as well as agricultural support in the form of subsidised fertiliser or other inputs – typically distributed according to the amount of land owned. Nevertheless, the poor may have benefited in so far as the rising tide of greater output lifts all boats.

Social protection necessary

There is currently enough food being produced to feed everyone in the world. The problem is that most of the hungry cannot afford to adequately feed themselves, lacking the means to do so. Hence, the only way to reduce hunger in the near term is to enhance the incomes of the poor.

More than three quarters of the over 1.2 billion “dollar a day” poor in the world live in the countryside. Reducing poverty will therefore require significantly higher rural incomes, especially for the poor. Since most rural incomes are related to agriculture, raising agricultural productivity can help raise rural incomes all round.

However, to realise the commitment to “no one left behind” in the face of the likely protracted global economic slowdown as well as higher underemployment and unemployment for years to come, the only way to eradicate hunger soon will be by establishing the social protection floor. The 2011 U.N. General Assembly endorsement of the recommendation to establish a social protection floor implies that the means to do so are available.

Historically, social protection has developed in relation to urban formal sector wage employment. But in developing countries, rural social provisioning has often involved “workfare” rather than state welfare as with India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

FAO’s distinctive approach to cash transfers — which accelerates the transition ‘from protection to production’ — helps ensure more sustainable means to overcome hunger and poverty, thus pointing the way forward to achieving the Zero Hunger Challenge.

*Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Development Department, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome.  

Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Akinwumi Adesina holding the FAO award recognising outstanding progress in fighting hunger and attaining MDG One. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

Thirty-eight countries were recognised for the first time on Sunday by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation for cutting in half the prevalence of people suffering from undernourishment, one of three targets under the first Millennium Development Goal.

Of those countries, 18 also achieved the tougher World Food Summit Goal of halving the absolute numbers of hungry people: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Djibouti, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Peru, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Vietnam.

“You are the proof that when societies decide to put an end to hunger, when there is political will from governments, we can transform that will into action,” FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva told leaders of the awarded countries during the Rome ceremony. “Thank you for showing us that it is possible.”

Twenty other countries were recognised for cutting by half the prevalence of hunger (but not yet absolute numbers): Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Honduras, Indonesia, Jordan, Malawi, Maldives, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, Togo and Uruguay.

At the Rome World Food Summit in 1996, countries around the world committed to working towards food security for all. In 2000, the U.N. adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals, meant to guide global efforts towards offering all people a decent life.

MDG One, “eradicating extreme poverty and hunger”, is broken down into three targets: reducing by 50 percent the proportion of hungry people, achieving decent employment for all, and halving the number of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day by 2015.

Received with broad acclaim by the FAO assembly during the award ceremony, the new Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, outlined in brief his country’s path to reducing hunger prevalence from 13.8 percent to 2.4 percent over the last decade, emphasising the core role played by former president Hugo Chavez in this battle.

“We are asking the FAO to assist us in creating a system to safeguard a permanent, stable food supply, which would permit us to confront the covert speculative attacks that Venezuela is currently enduring,” he told IPS TV.

Caribbean small island state Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is another of the countries acknowledged for meeting both goals. Since the early 1990s, it has reduced hunger rates from 20 percent to 4.9 percent, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-22 FAO biannual conference in Rome.

Gonsalves explained that climate change and pressures from international markets on domestic banana production posed significant challenges to his country in the attempt to defeat hunger. And yet the 120,000-person state seems to have found a working mix of solutions.

“We have a history of root vegetables and fruit crops and an accumulated two centuries worth of knowledge resident in the folk which should be mobilised and is being mobilised,” Gonsalves said.

“Secondly, important is the organisation of farmers to engage in cooperative work with the state. Finally, we are implementing targeted solutions such as feeding programmes for school children and the elderly and in general developing a strong safety net.

“We are addressing the production side but also the consumer side through targeted interventions,” the prime minister said.

Georgia, another country recognised in Rome, reduced the prevalence of malnourishment from 60 percent to 25 percent over the past decade, according to FAO figures.

“This was possible because of a number of different measures that we took to generally improve the economy and combat corruption and mismanagement, which allowed us to have double-digit growth for the past years,” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told IPS in Rome.

“Growth was combined with implementing poverty reduction programmes helping families to reach subsistence levels.”

Current estimates put the number of people suffering from hunger today at 870 million.

According to the U.N.’s The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 report, significant progress has been made on combating hunger since 1990, yet in some areas around the world this was either slowed down or even reversed by the global economic crisis.

The U.N. says that meeting the MDG goal of halving hunger prevalence by 2015 is within reach but only if measures are taken to make up for the negative impact of the crisis.

An estimated half of fresh produce in Papua New Guinea is lost between harvesting and marketing. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

Humanity currently needs the resources of one and a half planets to support our lifestyles. But do we really need to burn out the earth in order to feed ourselves?

A definitive “no” is the answer of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which has partnered with the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) to reduce the pollution intensity of food systems, from production to consumption."In reality, there is never a choice between agriculture and the environment." -- UNEP’s Fanny Demassieux

Launched in 2010, the two agencies’ Sustainable Food Systems Programme has no easy mission: with the world population expected to reach nine billion in the next decades and three billion people predicted to join the global middle class by 2050, food production is likely to erode even more of the earth’s resources unless radical measures are taken.

With this programme, the two U.N. bodies are embracing a new approach to food issues that calls for addressing all food-related activities in an interconnected manner.

What does this mean? For example, when trying to assess levels of waste produced by a retail chain, one must take into account not only the food directly thrown away by stores but also the vegetables abandoned in fields in exporting countries because of the high esthetic standards imposed by the retailer.

Addressing various parts of the global food chain separately only provides us with partial answers, according to this approach, while a more holistic outlook could bring surprising solutions.

At least a third of the food produced today is wasted. The production of this wasted food takes up a quarter of water resources used for agriculture, and results in about as much CO2 emissions as the whole United States is responsible for in one year. This is a sign of system failure but also an opportunity: cutting waste means both increasing food available for the needy and reducing pollution.

The systemic approach was endorsed last year at the Rio +20 Conference in Brazil, when all governments committed to a 10-year framework of sustainable production and consumption programmes.

In coming years, the FAO-UNEP programme could translate, for instance, into assistance provided to authorities on how to make food production more sustainable; informing consumers about how to reduce waste; or “voluntary sustainability standards” (a kind of sustainability certificate) that producers around the world can adhere to.

This U.N. vision of the future of the global food system must now be accepted and supported by governments around the world. The “voluntary” nature of the sustainability standards that are part of the programme already signals one of the potential weaknesses of this U.N. push, namely, that only some will commit to best practices.

“Food systems may be something very obvious when you are in FAO or UNEP, but on the ground people are wondering how to manage trade-offs between the economy and the environment,” UNEP’s Fanny Demassieux tells TerraViva on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-22 FAO biannual conference.

“But in reality, there is never a choice between agriculture and the environment because it is ecological foundations that agriculture is build on and depends on,” she adds.

“The fact that 15 percent of us in the world are still hungry is a collective failure, and this is something we must face up to and this is why it is necessary to try new approaches,” says Demassieux.

Development in Africa will only be led through agriculture, says the CEO of the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Dr. Ibrahim Mayaki.

CEO of NEPAD Ibrahim Mayaki. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Speaking to TerraViva at the opening of the weeklong 38th conference of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome on Saturday, Mayaki stresses that two-thirds of Africa’s population depends on agriculture, and it should therefore be placed at the centre of the multi-sectoral approach towards development.

“Trade, infrastructure and human capital development are all essential for agriculture development,” he says. “That is why NEPAD as a development agency for the African Union needs to take that multi-sectorality on board in its thinking, planning and interventions.”

Agriculture and food security are at the heart of the discussions in the Italian capital, where FAO member states are gathered at the biennial conference. According to the 2013 edition of FAO’s flagship report The State of Food and Agriculture, Africa leads the world with the highest prevalence of undernourished people, at nearly 23 percent of the population.

Liberian Ministry of Agriculture official Dr. Charles McClain attributes the high number of hungry people in Africa to national budgetary constraints.

“Our revenue as a continent is not where it should be so that we’re able to adequately invest in agriculture,” McClain says.

Despite the Maputo Declaration in 2003, in which African heads of state committed to a 10-percent allocation to agriculture, the continent remains far from achieving food security. Of the 54 African Union member states, just 10 have met this commitment.

“For instance, my country [Liberia] allocated only 2.4 percent [of the budget] to agriculture in the last financial year and it went down to 1.4 percent this year. We’re a country that’s recovering from war and we don’t have the resources,” McClain says.

To make up for the shortfall, Liberia – like many other African countries facing similar challenges – has turned to the donor community.

While Mayaki cautions that it will take time for the continent to make genuine progress on malnutrition, NEPAD’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) is providing countries with mechanisms and policies to realise this goal.

“It’s not always about the availability but also the accessibility to food,” he says. “The state has the responsibility to ensure that food is accessible to the vast majority of its citizens.”

This could be achieved through empowering small-scale farmers to become entrepreneurs so that they can sell and buy food, he says. Mayaki also called for the empowerment of civil society organisations so that they are able to shape the priorities of the state.

What can savvy global financial market traders learn from humble smallholder farmers in developing countries? Risk management in the face of climate change. 

“Farmers, particularly in the smallholder sector, are good risk managers because their fields usually have a diversity of crops in order to manage risk and ensure food security,” Linda Collette, secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, tells TerraViva on the sidelines of the 38th conference of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), which opened in Rome on Jun. 15.

“Especially now when biodiversity is under threat from many factors, including climate change.”

Linda Collette, Secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, Credit, Busani Bafana/ IPS

The 30-year-old Commission is the only permanent forum for governments to discuss and negotiate matters specific to biological diversity for food and agriculture. Genetic resources contained in crops, trees, marine and animal species are valuable in maintaining biodiversity in food systems. Genes are the molecular unit which contain the heredity of living organisms.

Global genetic resources are invaluable for food security, nutrition and livelihoods. The world should be worried about the future of food, Collette says, if no action is taken to conserve them and use them sustainably.

Genetic diversity — the root of biodiversity and therefore important for agriculture —  is being lost at an alarming rate due to factors such as climate change, loss of natural habitats, environmental degradation and population growth. An info graphic developed by FAO paints a worrisome  picture of the future of food.

What’s needed to correct the situation is an improvement in policy and legal frameworks on food security, as well as the integration of genetic resources and biodiversity into the development agenda, according to the Commission — which will table its Second Global Plan of Action at this week’s conference in Rome.

“We cannot have food if we do not use and manage our genetic resources,” Collette says. “When we reduce some genetic resources, this also reduces their genetic pool that provides resilience and traits that might be helpful in the future.” "We cannot have food if we do not use and manage our genetic resources." - Linda Collette, secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture

As climate change stalks global agriculture, researchers should collaborate with smallholder farmers in enhancing the diversification of crops that use water differently and more efficiently  to ensure food security, says Dr. Emile Frison, director-general of Bioversity International.

Adopting a plant diversity approach, according to Frison, has the double benefit of protecting biodiversity and ensuring food security for farmers. “Water is going to be a limiting factor in the future and our interest is in how to make use of this scarce resource for the benefit of smallholder farmers who value biodiversity to manage risks.”

Through its research, Bioversity is availing many crop varieties to farmers that match their current needs, especially in a changing climate. Under its Seeds for Needs project in Ethiopia, the organisation has used Geographic Information System (GIS) technology — which visualises geographic and meteorological data and trends– to find out which plant varieties in gene banks will be suitable in different areas and rainfall conditions and make these available to farmers there.

Bioversity is promoting greater diversification by re-introducing crops that have virtually disappeared or have been neglected. It is working with women’s groups growing traditional leafy vegetables in Kenya. The project has given the women greater income and better nutrition.

Because of their adaptability, diversity and nutritional benefits,  indigenous food plant species can help beat malnutrition and poverty in Africa, says Prof. Mary Abulutsa Onyango, a Kenyan horticultural researcher.

“Indigenous fruits and vegetables,” she says, “have several advantages that have not been fully exploited. They can withstand harsh climatic conditions and are highly nutritious in terms of vitamins and minerals.”

Caption: FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva presents the Jacques Diouf Award to Reema Nanavaty of SEWA. Credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Stella Paul
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

Jassiben, a self-employed potter from Nana Shahpur village in western India, loves summer despite the heat waves and frequent power cuts, because summer days always mean great business.

“Poor people like us do not have refrigerators, so they store drinking water in the earthen pots that keep the water cool,” says Jassiben, who uses only one name."The best thing is that my husband doesn’t have to migrate anymore. Now he helps me run this business." -- Jassiben, a self-employed potter from Nana Shahpur

“This year, the demand has been so high, I am selling at least a dozen pots every day,” she says with a smile. That fetches over 17 dollars – literally a month’s worth of food.

Jassiben was born into a potters’ family, but married a landless farmer. About six years ago, her husband started to migrate to the city in the summer as work became scarce due to a water shortage.

Left behind with two infants, Jessiben often faced hunger and starvation. She wanted to start making pots to help her family, but found nobody willing to lend her any money.

“The nearest market is about 10 kms away, the roads are bad and most pots break while transporting. So everyone thought it was a high-risk business,” she says.

Three years ago, she heard of the Shri Mahila Sewa Sahakari Bank, which offered micro-loans to poor women to start a business. It was founded in 1974 by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a non-profit organisation that helps women become find a livelihood and become self-reliant.

Jassiben borrowed 60 dollars, a sum that helped her buy a potter’s wheel and build an extra room in her house to store her pots.

“It was a turning point. I discovered that buyers too found it equally troublesome to buy a pot in the market and bring it home intact. Now, they can come to my home, choose a pot or any other item they want, and even order one. I now earn about Rs 5,000 (86 dollars) every month. But the best thing is that my husband doesn’t have to migrate anymore. Now he helps me run this business,” she says.

SEWA bank initially had 4,000 self-employed women workers. Today it has over 50,000 depositors and a working capital of 174,000 dollars. It functions as a cooperative, in which all the members and customers are self-employed women and policies are made by their own elected board.

In recognition to their great contribution to women’s empowerment, SEWA was presented with the Jacques Diouf Award Saturday by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at its ongoing 38th conference in Rome.

Accepting the award on behalf of its 1.7 million members, Reemaben Nanavaty, president of SEWA, tells TerraViva that through the initiative of the SEWA bank, poor women have been given control of natural and financial resources.

“The SEWA Bank has contributed directly in achieving, to some extent, the larger SEWA goals of organising and creating visibility for self-employed women, enabling them to get a higher income and to have control over their own income,” she says.

“A large number of members now have their own hand-carts, sewing machines, looms and tools of carpentry and blacksmithy to work with. Many of them have upgraded their skills and developed more business.”

According to Nanavaty, the award is a great motivation. “I dedicate this award to all the women who are fighting poverty and finding food security and financial self-reliance collectively,” she says.

SEWA shares the award with the European Commission, which has also been working to reduce poverty and ensure food security in 50 countries across the world.

Other FAO awards handed out Saturday recognised the UK-based Guardian newspaper’s global development team for its reporting on agriculture, food security and poverty; FAO field officers David Doolan, Patrick Durst, and Luca Alinovi; the Kenya Forest Service; and the Organización del Sector Pesquero y Acuícola del Istmo Centroamericano (OSPESCA).

Kenyan farmer Geoffrey Ndung’u adapted to a prolonged drought and now earns a living growing watermelon. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has long warned that a quarter of the world’s farmland is “highly degraded”.

The main culprits are natural disasters, including droughts, floods and desertification. These pressures have now reached critical levels, with climate change expected to worsen the situation, according to the FAO’s annual report The State of Food and Agriculture, released here."Farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow." -- Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation

At the 38th session of FAO’s biannual conference, currently underway in Rome, three major issues on the table are the high level of undernourishment, volatile food prices and sustainable agricultural productivity.

The United Nations said up to 12 percent of Africa’s agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) is being lost due to environmental degradation, with comparable figures for countries in Latin America varying from six percent in Paraguay to about 24 percent in Guatemala.

According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), food yields in Uzbekistan have declined by 20 to 30 percent, while in East Africa nearly 3.7 million people still require food aid following the 2011 drought.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” said UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja.

“Desertification, land degradation and drought are key constraints to building social and environmental resilience, achieving global food security and delivering meaningful poverty reduction,” he added.

Mohamed Adow, global advisor on climate change at the UK-based Christian Aid, which promotes sustainable development and battles hunger and global poverty, told IPS, “Climate change remains the significant challenge facing food security.”

Extreme and less predictable weather patterns are having the first and hardest impacts on food production, which in turn affects those who are least able to protect themselves, he added.

Adow said that with just the current 0.8 C rise in global temperatures, the world is suffering from increased hunger, disease, floods and sea level rise.

“And this is predicted to worsen given the abysmally weak climate pollution targets in developed countries,” he noted.

This means that year after year, the numbers of people needing food aid and adaptation support are increasing as the effects of climate change exceed the coping limits of the poor, and as more people go hungry.

Developed countries have a responsibility and obligation to take decisive action to support adaptation and increase opportunities to develop sustainable climate-resilient livelihoods all over the world, Adow declared.

Teresa Anderson of the London-based Gaia Foundation, which advocates secure land, seed, food and water sovereignty, told IPS one of the key reasons for the existence of the U.N. climate convention is to address the inevitable impacts that climate change and increasingly erratic weather will have on food production.

Less rain, more rain, rain coming at unpredictable times – all this affects the germination and growth of crops, she pointed out.

Changing temperatures that are too high or too low can also reduce growth and pollination. And different pests and diseases are likely to emerge in different climatic conditions.

“To deal with these multiple challenges, farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow, while improving soil health,” said Anderson.

Unfortunately, the growth of agribusiness focused on selling fertilisers and just a few types of seed, is making farming even more vulnerable to climate change, she added.

In addition, communities reliant on fishing and livestock grazing may find the ecosystems on which they rely producing less fish or grass.

Anderson said many communities will also face extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and droughts, as well as slow-onset impacts such as rising sea levels and salination that will make food production impossible.

Meanwhile, a report released at the climate change talks in Bonn last week by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said the cloudy aspects of climate forecasts are no excuse for a paralysis in agriculture adaptation policies.

“Climate projections will always have a degree of uncertainty, but we need to stop using uncertainty as a rationale for inaction,” said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CGIAR’s research programme on climate change, agriculture and food security (CCAFS) and lead author of the study.

“Even when our knowledge is incomplete, we often have robust grounds for choosing best-bet adaptation actions and pathways, by building pragmatically on current capacities in agriculture and environmental management, and using projections to add detail and to test promising options against a range of scenarios,” she said.

The CCAFS analysis shows how decision-makers can sift through the different gradients of scientific uncertainty to understand where there is, in fact, a general degree of consensus and then move to take action.

Moreover, she said, it encourages a broader approach to agriculture adaptation that looks beyond climate models to consider the socioeconomic conditions on the ground. These conditions, such as a particular farmer’s or community’s capacity to make the necessary changes, will determine whether a particular adaptation strategy is likely to succeed.

Happy Shongwe, a smallholder farmer from rural Maphungwane in eastern Swaziland, shows off her seeds. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MAPHUNGWANE, Swaziland, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

The overcast sky is a sign that it might rain, and Happy Shongwe, a smallholder farmer from rural Maphungwane in eastern Swaziland, is not exactly happy.

Inside a roofless structure made of cement blocks sit different types of legumes – peanuts, jugo beans, mung beans, cow peas and ground nuts – which she has placed in separate containers. “Women also form the majority of farmers and it makes sense to ensure that women have enough inputs to do their farming.” -- FAO assistant representative Khanyisile Mabuza

“If I don’t cover the seeds, the rain will spoil them and they will fail the test at the laboratory,” Shongwe tells IPS. “I have to cover the seeds with a sail to ensure that the rain doesn’t get to them.”

The unfinished structure is where she keeps her harvest for drying, before taking the legumes to the storage containers. An award-winning smallholder farmer who cultivates nothing but legume seeds for planting, Shongwe says the crop is drought tolerant and grows well in the dry parts of the country.

“I always monitor the weather because the little rainfall we get from this part of the country is enough to germinate the seeds,” she says. “You just have to know your weather so that you plant at the right time.”

She is preparing to take samples of her harvest to the Ministry of Agriculture’s Seed Quality Control laboratory for testing. If her seeds are of good quality, then she’ll package and label her stock before it is ready for sale.

“I get a certificate that shows that my seeds germinate at the required standard, therefore good for planting,” explains Shongwe.

One of her major clients is the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. FAO buys the seed for the organisation’s demonstration plots to promote conservation agriculture.

“FAO has placed an order of one tonne of ground nuts from this harvest which we are supposed to supply by September,” says Shongwe.

On her own she cannot supply such a big order from her four-hectare farm, so she works with a group of 10 women calling themselves the Lutsango Palata Cooperative. In fact, she chairs the association of women she has mobilised herself to go into seed production.

“We make a lot of money from selling the seed inputs compared to farmers who sell for food,” says Shongwe.

The National Maize Corporation buys a 50kg bag of maize at 13 dollars while a 5kg bag of nuts sells for 14 dollars.

There are about 10 associations of women doing similar work, bringing the number of farmers in this project to over 100, all from the drought-stricken Lubombo Region. These farmers produce indigenous seeds which they sell within their communities before offering them countrywide.

“It used to be very difficult for farmers to come across seed inputs for legumes because these are marginalised crops,” according to FAO assistant representative Khanyisile Mabuza.

Mabuza said FAO asked the Ministry of Agriculture to train women farmers in seed production and entrepreneurship back in the 1990s when the drought started. In 2008, FAO introduced Input Trade Fairs (ITF) where poor farmers received 72 dollars in vouchers from FAO to buy farming inputs.

“The community-based seed producers were also invited as vendors at the ITFs and that is where more women started joining in,” Mabuza tells IPS.

In the Kingdom, she says, legumes are considered “women’s crops” and men ignore them. As a result, there was a deliberate effort by FAO to target women to grow seed for themselves for these marginalised crops, which are very important in balancing the diet.

“Women also form the majority of farmers and it makes sense to ensure that women have enough inputs to do their farming,” says Mabuza.

She adds that there was a deliberate effort by FAO to target the dry areas, because legumes tend to withstand drought. For many years, farmers have been persistent in their cultivation of maize, which is the country’s staple food, although they received no yield because of the drought.

“We want our farmers to understand that because of climate change, drought is going to be a part of their lives and they must now learn to adapt,” according to Mabuza.

Farmers from the drought-stricken areas can sell their legumes so that they can afford to buy maize from their counterparts based in wetter areas.

“We’re very happy with the progress these women farmers are making,” says Mabuza.

The community-based seed producers are providing an alternative to the escalating costs of hybrid seed products sold by two multinational companies in the country, Seed Co. and Pannar. According to Seed Quality Control operations manager, Chris Mthethwa, many subsistence farmers do not have enough resources to buy the expensive hybrids.

“The advantage with indigenous seeds is that you can replant their offspring, yet that is not possible with hybrids,” according to Mthethwa.

He said the big companies are also reluctant to sell indigenous seeds because they are not as profitable as their hybrid counterparts. That is why the government, with support from FAO, decided to mobilise smallholder farmers to produce the indigenous seeds, whose taste many Swazis prefer.

There is a possibility that seeds from the smallholder farmers will be exported under the Food Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) Harmonised Seed Security Programme (HASSP).

Swaziland is among four countries in this programme – Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe – working on aligning their seed legislation with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Seed Regulatory System. According to HASSP programme manager Dr. Bellah Mpofu, this pilot project will ensure easy movement within the SADC region of seeds produced from the participating countries.

“This will improve the access to and availability of quality seed to smallholder farmers,” he tells IPS.

This means by the end of the project this year, Shongwe, who won the 2011 FANRPAN Civil Society Policy Movers and Shakers Award, can expand her customer base.

“I can’t wait to start exporting,” she says proudly.

With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expiring in less than 1,000 days, new goals are needed that prioritise support for smallholder farmers to better access markets and increase productivity, nutrition and incomes.

Kenyan farmer Isaac Ochieng Okwanyi enjoyed his most successful harvest ever after using lime to improve the quality of his soil. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

Michael Hoevel, deputy director of a UK-based think tank called Agriculture for Impact, says that the MDGs have helped galvanise efforts to address the world’s most fundamental development challenges, including the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

“The [new] Sustainable Development Goals can move even further by setting clear metrics for how this can happen,” he says. “For instance, we should be promoting ‘sustainable intensification’ into these goals – looking at metrics such as agricultural productivity and rural incomes on the one hand and GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and resource use per unit of output on the other hand.”

Andrew Emmott of Twin, a UK-based fair trade group that works with more than 50 farmer organisations, notes that food safety is not a feature of the MDGs, despite presenting significant barriers to achieving Goal Four on reducing child mortality and Goal Six on combating diseases.

“There is a danger that the Sustainable Development Goals may not tackle the global food safety challenge but focus on a less defined interpretation of food security and nutrition,” Emmott says. “Nutrition interventions, seen as some of the most cost-effective, are undermined by not addressing food safety as toxins such as aflatoxin are anti-nutritious, as well as harmful to health.”

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, malnutrition costs the global economy as much as five percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), equivalent to 3.5 trillion dollars annually or 500 dollars a person. Impact for Agriculture noted that over 200 million people go hungry and 40 percent of children under age five are stunted due to malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa today.

“Twin believes that incorporating food safety into the food security and nutrition goals will create the impetus to develop novel finance mechanisms in post-harvest drying and storage for households and communities as well as formal value chains,” Emmott says, explaining that this approach should seek to improve food safety, reduce food waste, support local food systems and make food more readily available for longer periods over the year.

“This will reduce the need to increase food production, and should result in less people becoming malnourished, as well as improving public health through better food safety.”

Hoevel and Emmott agree that in structuring the new goals, the development of markets for smallholder farmers is essential.

“Creating more connected and inclusive markets will be key here,” Hoevel said. “Innovative approaches should be tested and refined over time, as long as safety nets are in place for the farmers involved.”

Two recent reports by Agriculture for Impact highlight how smallholder farmers can be supported to access input and output markets more effectively. When scaling up investments or development programmes, it is essential to adapt them to the local context, both in terms of agroecological conditions and socioeconomic realities.

According to Hoevel, the lion’s share of future market-based opportunities for smallholders lies in domestic and regional markets. Smallholders can also access global export markets if they are supported with good agronomic and business advice, quality inputs and the ability to organise themselves to benefit from economies of scale.

Twin’s experience, Emmott told IPS, has shown that organisation is the key to accessing value-added markets for smallholder farmers.

“By forming cooperatives and working collectively, marginalised smallholders can gain support to develop their skills and increase their productivity at the farm level, as well as having strength through numbers,” said Emmott.

“Farmers who negotiate contracts and trade collectively not only get a better price than at the local market, they are less likely to be short-changed through faulty scales or exploited by unscrupulous loan sharks.”

Rice is a staple for much of humanity. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

“If there was enough political will to defeat hunger, we would defeat it right now – immediately,” says Enrique Yeves, chief of corporate communications at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“It is a scandal that in the 21^st century there are still people that suffer from hunger in a world in which we produce more food than we need,” adds Yeves, speaking on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-21 FAO biannual conference opening Saturday in Rome."The crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.” -- IPC's Antonio Onorati

Almost one billion people do not have enough to eat, yet we throw away one-third to one-half of the food we produce, according to U.N. estimates.

This is one of the paradoxes at the core of the global food system.

The world made progress over the last decade in combating hunger. But a widespread and lingering economic crisis has reversed this trend, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, according to FAO’s own assessments. High and volatile global food prices are putting additional strains on the world’s poor, as is the rapid depletion of natural resources caused by our unsustainable way of life.

This year, FAO’s membership will hit 195, once South Sudan, Brunei and Singapore join next week.

The sense of urgency in addressing hunger in the midst of the multiple global crises is reflected in the current attempt to reform FAO in order to make it more efficient and results-oriented.

“In the 2000s, there was even talk of shutting down FAO altogether, as the mantra of liberalisation of markets as a solution for food security became dominant and the World Trade Organisation became the locus for most food talks,” says Antonio Onorati from IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, a platform bringing together around 300 million small food producers from all over the world in order to dialogue with FAO.

“But then we had the economic crisis and the food crises and the governments understood there was a need for a multilateral space for dealing with food issues,” he tells IPS. “They also understood that the crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.”

FAO’s Brazilian Director General José Graziano da Silva has come up with a set of proposals, including concentrating the organisation’s work around five strategic objectives: contributing to the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition; increasing and improving the provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner; reducing rural poverty; enabling more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems at local, national and international levels; increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises.

Another important change will be the mainstreaming of gender issues across FAO programmes, a move that is very much welcomed by civil society.

“Women are the majority of farmers yet they have always been discriminated in agricultural policies,” says Alberta Guerra from Action Aid International. “If women are given the resources they need, many will be taken out of poverty. We are happy to see the progress made by FAO on gender mainstreaming.”

Da Silva, who came to FAO after being responsible for implementing the Fome Zero programme in Brazil, said to have lifted 28 million people out of poverty, may indeed have the needed stamina and good reputation to carry the reform package through.

Yet there will likely be resistance from governments gathering in Rome. One contentious issue is a minor budget increase put up for discussion: FAO’s budget was 1.005 billion dollars in the 2012-13 period, and the organisation is now asking for an increase of one percent from its member states for 2014-15.

Some member states may resist this budget hike and these may be precisely the rich countries, as larger developing ones (most notably the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are already committed to increasing their financial contributions to FAO apart from the one percent: China by an additional 21.3 million dollars, Brazil by 15.3 million and Russia by 9.2 million dollars.

According to Onorati, the changes proposed by the FAO staff entail a “system view” of food issues – that is, looking at all factors together and interlinked – which is welcome. He also welcomes the organisation’s increased openness to civil society.

At the same time, Onorati warns that some of the national delegations coming to Rome may be less open than FAO itself to such changes.