Global food prices force about 100 million people into hunger.

High food prices are pushing 30 million Africans into poverty.

About 850 million people are suffering from chronic hunger worldwide.

Food prices have hit the highest levels in real terms in 30 years.

Price of rice has gone up by 75% globally.

Global food prices rose by 43% in 2007 alone.

The US has diverted about 40 million tons of maize to produce ethanol.

An acre of maize produces only 50 gallons of gasoline.

EU plans to get 10% of auto fuel from Bio-energy by 2020.

Food riots and food wars are not just taking place in the streets of Egypt and in Mexico, they are taking place in the corridors of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN)

Last week’s Rome Food Security Summit was all about getting world leaders in one place and agreeing on a strategy to ensure access to sufficient food for all. Billions of dollars are being wasted on feeding obese people in the West while millions starve around the world, Jacques Diouf, the United Nations food agency chief, has told world leaders at a summit on food security in Rome.

“No one understands… how over-consumption by obese people in the world costs $20bn each year,” Diouf said. “On top of this, there are $100bn in indirect costs resulting from premature deaths and associated diseases.”

Speaking at the opening of the three-day UN Food and Agriculture Organisation summit in Italy’s capital, Diouf also highlighted how an estimated $1.2 trillion was spent on weapons in 2006 while aid to agriculture fell by more than half, from $8bn in 1984 to $3.4bn in 2004.

The official statements coming out of the event were heavily laced with the same message: “It’s time for action”. Not everyone is happy with the summit’s outcome, I’m not.
It saw the signing of a declaration to make food security a matter of permanent policy, and implement short and medium-term measures to alleviate the current crisis and reduce risk of a recurrence. What about the long term future?

There have been murmurs that the declaration was watered down as participants were unable to agree on the causes of the food crisis – the very first step towards seeking a solution.

Biofuels, for instance, were a big bone of contention, as I wrote in the last diary. There were proposals for standards or criteria for biofuels, to reduce the effect that competition for grain supplies is having on the availability of grain-based food.

As The New York Times summed it up: “Everyone complained about other people’s protectionism, and defended their own”.

When you consider how the American reserve bank and the European bank have just, in the last six months, put up hundreds of billions to stabilize the financial structure of the world, I find it amazing that this sort of money cannot be available straight away for the people who are now suffering from hunger. On one hand in the West, we have the problem of obesity and food waste and, on the other hand, we have 100 million people going to bed hungry every night.

With 850 million hungry people in the world and a need to double food production by 2030, the world really does not have much time to waste squabbling over who should be giving up what. The comments on protectionism sound eerily similar to those made over the stalled Doha trade talks since they began in 2001.

The FAO’s spirit is the one everyone should be sharing. Now is the time for action. It is not the time for vested national interests. And this applies to developing countries implementing export bans on certain staples just as much as the US and EU doggedly propping up their own agriculture through high subsidies.

You and I have been listening to world leaders saying time and time again the things that NGOs have been saying for the past 20 years or so. We have been saying that everyone has the right to food. We have been saying that the lack of food is a man-made problem, and that women and children suffer the consequences.

We have been saying that the real cause of the rise in food prices is the forced integration of local economies into an international economy controlled by speculative monopolies. Someone observed, can’t quite remember who but this is a pertinent point, that if five grain giants control food trade, it does not matter how much food there is in the world, they will make their super profits. Let’s not forget that Climate Change was caused by roughly 25 per cent by industrial agriculture. Add another 10 per cent because of rising fuel prices and you’re talking about 35 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions coming from a non-sustainable farming system. What are we going to do when we hit severe food and water shortages in a dozen years or so?

“We could solve the climate problem and the food problem with investments, but not the level of investments the World Bank is talking about by supporting ecological agriculture. It is about supporting local economies, and the most important point is a valid international assessment,” said one BBC journalist.

At the end of the day, the rich countries, ie the developed countries, do not seem to be prepared to stop subsidizing their agricultural products and dumping them, undercutting the local farmers in developing countries. There’s no better time to push for real reforms than at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, next month. But, as I said before the Rome Conference, don’t hold your breath. I’m not.

This is true for many fruit and vegetable crops. To prevent trucks of produce from being rejected, crops are “culled” (hand sorted) after they are picked. About half goes into the truck on its way to the store. The other half goes into the truck going to the dump, or destined to be plowed under and sprayed with insecticide. The food being thrown away is not rotten or bad in any way.

This news come hot on the heels of the UN food summit in Rome which ended in failure as delegates bungle the final declaration. As I reported on the the Rome conference for the last three days, here, here and here, I personally did not have much hope that anything of substance would be accomplished in three short days, marred by the presence of two tyrants, Mugabe & Ahmadinejad who both managed to lay all ills at the foot of the western world’s door.

The UN’s food crisis summit lurched to a messy end in Rome yesterday as brave hopes failed to translate into convincing commitments to tackle the soaring threat of world hunger. A final declaration was only agreed after hours of bickering over the language. And the final text failed to disguise dramatic differences over the cause of price inflation and its cure.

Nevertheless, it is America which has once again been subject to the biggest criticism at the Rome summit – this time for its policy of vast ethanol subsidies, with its effect of turning about a quarter of what was its corn production into fuel for cars, blindly promoted by George W Bush when he was made to realize that his Iraq war had failed in its objective of increasing the supply of “friendly” oil from the Middle East. Someone ought to send a memo to the future President, Barack Obama, to ensure that this absurdity would end on his watch.

Although the World Food Program has been given an additional $3bn of emergency food aid, and the Islamic Development Bank has promised to deliver $1.5bn to help farmers in some of the poorest countries increase production, I find that since the conference was informed that up to $30bn a year in aid pledges (UN’s Ban Ki Moon figure) would be necessary to alleviate the developing world’s hunger, these sums are hardly cause for great celebration.

The prevalent view to solve the global food price emergency is to invest heavily in agricultural production in poor countries through UN agencies, eliminate rich world farm subsidies and impose a moratorium on recently established bio-fuel programs. To enable these policies we need strong leadership, and political will, which frankly, is lacking worldwide.

Reading through several online news (BBC, EuroNews, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel), Senior European officials say some of those countries, prompted by Brazil, will not sign a final statement which might “demonize” biofuels. Brazil – one of the main biofuels producers – has fiercely defended its right to grow sugarcane for ethanol.

“All the regions without exception have accepted the language of the draft declaration. All countries and regions are unhappy with some elements, the EU is unhappy with the mentions of trade, for example, but they have compromised. But the Latin Americans are not budging,” the official added.

Ban Ki Moon praised French President Nicolas Sarkozy for pledging more than $1.5 billion over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity in Africa. Saudi Arabia has already announced it is giving around $500 million to the World Food Program to deal with the emergency in the short term, and the United States has committed some $5 billion over the next two years, much of it to help find long-term solutions. The leaders quickly laid out their disagreements on a key issue: how much the rush for environmentally friendly biofuels is contributing to soaring prices that are causing hunger and unrest worldwide. Discussion of whether to scale back or push ahead with the introduction of biofuels – fuels made from sugar cane, corn and other crops – is likely to weigh heavily on attempts to come up with a global strategy to solve the crisis.

Proponents say the fuels are a way to combat climate change and rising oil prices, while others argue they accelerate global warming by encouraging deforestation and heavily contribute to the commodities price hike by diverting production from food crops to biofuel crops.

The president of Brazil, whose country’s sugar cane has long been used to produce ethanol that fuels cars and trucks, delivered an impassioned defense of biofuels.

“It is frightening to see attempts to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between biofuels and the rise of food prices,” said Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal.”

The United States, which also tried to exonerate biofuels from the charge of rising prices, has been heavily subsidizing corn-based ethanol production. Last year I reported that the 27-nation European Union endorsed a plan calling for a 10-percent share of biofuels for road vehicles by 2020. “In some cases, biofuel production is in competition with food supply,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told the Rome summit on Tuesday. “We need to ensure that biofuel production is sustainable.”

While agreeing that sustainability and innovation are needed, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer insisted that biofuels contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.

“The use of sustainable biofuels can increase energy security, foster economic development especially in rural areas, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily on food prices,” Schafer said in his address. More money would go to cellulosic ethanol, made from plant matter. But even among countries like the U.S. and Brazil, there was little agreement on the best way to tap the energy source.

Understandably, Brazil’s president lashed out at the U.S. approach, saying corn-based ethanol is less efficient than the fuel produced with sugar cane and that the former can only compete “when it is shored up with subsidies and shielded behind tariffs.”

In sharp contrast to this conference, anthropologist Timothy Jones renewed his call on the BBC (and Al Jazeera) this morning to stop wasting foodstuffs. His in-depth study revealed that almost half the food in the country goes to waste – a statistic that should alarm an industry that is struggling to achieve greater efficiency in order to salvage profits.

Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, has spent the last 10 years measuring food loss, including the last eight under a grant from the US department of agriculture (USDA). Jones started examining practices in farms and orchards, before going onto food production, retail, consumption and waste disposal. What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security.

Food for thought. Tomorrow I’ll report on the wording of the so-called “declaration”.

In his opening presentation, FAO director general Jacques Diouf pointed out that, in 2006, the total amount spent by nations on arms was $1200 bn. Here are some horrifying figures: just one country could waste as much as $100bn, and excess consumption contributing to global obesity amounted to $20bn.

Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, said the solution to the current world food crisis had to include financial support for African farmers.

Attending the conference in his new role as the chair of Agra, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he said the African farmer was the only farmer in the world that still took all the risks, often operating without financial support, expertise or safety nets.

Earlier, World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said the Rome summit should commit to helping the twenty most vulnerable countries in the coming weeks before soaring food prices push millions more into poverty or malnutrition. Outlining three priority actions for the Rome meeting on the food crisis, Mr. Zoellick said the agencies and governments at the meeting should also commit to getting seeds and fertilizer out to smallholder farmers in the coming planting months and agree on an international call to scrap food export bans and restrictions. Ideally, someone ought to tell Monsanto: no terminator seeds please!

“Globally, we have estimated that this crisis could push 100 million people into poverty – 30 million in Africa alone. This is not a natural catastrophe. It is man-made and can be fixed by us. It does not take complex research. We know what has to be done. We just need action and resources in real-time,”

outlined Robert Zoellick. To support this agenda, the World Bank last week created a new Global Food Crisis Response Facility to fast-track $1.2 billion to address immediate needs arising from the food crisis, including $200 million of grants for especially vulnerable countries. Grant operations have been approved for Haiti, Djibouti and Liberia; operations are being processed for Togo, Tajikistan and Yemen. The Bank announced that overall, the World Bank Group will expand assistance for agriculture and food-related activities from $4 billion to $6 billion over the coming year.

Solving the structural problem at the heart of food security is a matter of increasing production and productivity in low-income, food-deficit problems. This requires “innovative and imaginative solutions”, such as partnerships between countries that have money, management capabilities and technologies at their disposal, and those that have land, water and human resources. However richer nations have already been shown unwilling to put their money where their mouths are. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

This Food Conference comprises two segments running simultaneously throughout the three days: the High-Level Segment and the Committee of the Whole.

The High-Level Segment hears statements from the heads of governments and delegations, while the Committee of the Whole will focus on:

* High food prices: causes, consequences and possible solutions
* Climate change and food security
* Transboundary pests and diseases
* Bioenergy and food security

Other news from Rome is of course the unexpected arrival of President Mugabe and his shopacholic wife, Grace, which prompted a flood of international protests yesterday after he joined more than 60 world leaders flying in for the three-day conference. The grotesque irony of the situation was lost on no one. “Robert Mugabe going to Rome for the food summit is like Pol Pot going to a human rights convention,” said Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister for Africa, referring to the mastermind of the Cambodian genocide. I couldn’t have worded this better. The British representative to the meeting, Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said Mr Mugabe’s appearance was “obscene”.

“Regrettably, this elicited wrath from our former colonial master,” Mugabe said. “In retaliation for the measures we took to empower the black majority, the United Kingdom has mobilised its friends in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand to impose illegal economic sanctions against Zimbabwe.”

In fact, there are no trade or investment restrictions on Zimbabwe. The only “sanctions” in place are travel bans supposedly preventing Mr Mugabe and 124 of his allies from visiting any member of the European Union.

Another clown, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has also used the Conference in Rome to attack Israel, hinting that “Zionists” were behind rising food prices across the world. Meh!

In a far-reaching report on global food prices, the UN questions the contribution of institutional investors to the recent turmoil in commodity markets.

“A key concern now is the participation of new agents that are perceived to be motivated by risk-diversification to the exclusion of serious assessment of price levels.”

A month ago I wrote a diary which, gasp, dared to suggest that indeed there was a tidal wave of investors and speculators pouring into the futures markets for corn, wheat, rice and other commodities and who were driving up prices.

Although it would be foolish to blame traders for the epidemically high food prices since the known causes also lie with the rising cost of transportation, biofuels and the emergence of Asian economies among a host of other reasons, non-food industry players are increasingly turning to tools of the derivative markets, such as futures and options, to help manage risks linked to the volatility of commodity prices.

As world prices for wheat, maize and oilseed crops doubled between 2005 and 2007, confirmed by the FAO, tools that help food firms understand, and cope with, future costs for their businesses are clearly of value. Attracted by potential gains to be had through the price volatility of the commodity markets, institutional investors outside of the food industry have recently brought “vast amounts of money”, say the UN, to these areas.

Derivative-markets prices in the US, such as options and futures for wheat, soybeans and maize, are widely quoted as indicative prices and are the focus of much commercial activity. Ideally, says the FAO, “these markets help to pool information at low costs to help discover prices and provide a venue for trading risk”.

But, citing data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the FAO states that monthly trading volumes increased from February 2005 to February 2008 by a whacking 125 per cent for wheat, a considerable 85 per cent for maize, and 56 per cent for soybeans.

According to the FAO, total open interest in maize, for example, rose from 0.66 million contracts in February 2005 to 1.45 million in February 2008, during which time non-commercial traders’, that is, non-food industry participants – share in opening interest in long (a commitment to buy) positions increased from 17 per cent to a considerable 43 per cent. That pattern is repeated in the wheat and soybean derivative markets. Furthermore, speculators “tend to take one-sided positions…known to be hedging other risk in their portfolios typically by taking long positions – a commitment to buy, as opposed to short positions – commitments to sell,” explains the report.

The aggregate effect of all their activities in the commodity markets is that the speculators are, arguably, pushing up derivative market prices in the short term.

In turn, helping to drive up the raw material prices for the food supply chain, from farmer and ingredients maker, to processor and retailer.

And given the presence of this massive volume of non-commercial investments, plus the fact that they move in and out of commodity trading, increased price volatility seems a plausible result in the short term, warned the report.

Reflecting on the long term impact of speculators’ involvement in the commodity markets, the FAO said “the jury is still out”.

Reading through the pdf, FAO acknowledges the importance of biodiversity to food security but also raises an alarm: it estimates that about three-quarters of the varietal genetic diversity of agricultural crops have been lost over the last century and that hundreds of the 7000 animal breeds registered in its databases are threatened by extinction.
Just twelve crops and fourteen animal species now provide most of the world’s food. Fewer genetic diversity means fewer opportunities for the growth and innovation needed to boost agriculture at a time of soaring food prices.

As biodiversity used in food and agriculture declines, the food supply becomes more vulnerable and unsustainable. Agriculture becomes less able to adapt to environmental challenges, such as climate change or water scarcity. If you have some spare time this week, take a look at the pdf and see if I’m hallucinating from info overload!

On the Project Concern site, there’s this message: Here is a challenge to consider: tonight – for just one night – go without dinner; go to bed hungry. This act of conviction serves to remind each of us of the global emergency that is currently being described by the World Food Program as the “silent tsunami.”

Imagine having to go without food for days on end as roughly a billion people do on a regular basis. Imagine having to put your kids to sleep at night hungry. How did we get to this point and what did the various governments in the world do to alleviate the hunger and the suffering? Not much, as most States still spend a large portion of their GDP, doggedly, in defense, shoring up armies and armament as if there’s no tomorrow, still drawing invisible battle lines on the earth, water and space.

However, there is movement at the station, to paraphrase Banjo Paterson.

“The Group of Eight countries should shift a greater proportion of their overseas development assistance to agriculture in order to tackle the current food crisis” the most senior United Nations’ agriculture official said on Friday.

Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said that as chair of the G8, Japan should take the initiative in reversing the fall in the proportion of ODA allocated to agriculture. Japan responded by:

Japan to sell rice stockpile to help global shortages:

The United States says it will consider letting Japan on-sell imported American rice to other countries, to curb rising prices and meet supply shortages after Cyclone Nagis destroyed rice production in Burma (under World Trade Organization rules, Japan can’t export its US imported rice without US permission) Japan currently has 1.5 million tonnes of imported rice in storage. Nearly 900,000 tonnes of it was purchased from the US. The good news is that rice futures for July delivery have tumbled more than five per cent on Chicago’s Board of Trade as a result of the unofficial announcement. Furthermore Tokyo has placed the global food crisis on the agenda of the G8 summit in July, making it then first time in nearly thirty years that the richest countries discuss food shortages and concomitant prices. About effing time!

Mr Diouf said not only had overall ODA been declining, but “more seriously the share of agriculture [aid] in ODA has gone from 17 per cent in 1980 to 3 per cent in 2005. “In particular, efforts were needed to support agriculture in Africa, he added.

“With just 4 per cent of arable land in sub-Saharan Africa irrigated, against 38 per cent in Asia, there is a need to invest in irrigation in Africa to solve the problem of food. Africa also needs urgent investment in roads and food storage, as up to 60 per cent of food production is lost due to a lack of storage facilities. Global agriculture production has been affected by natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts and floods at a time when cereal stocks were at their lowest in 30 years,”

Mr Diouf said.

The staple for half the world reached a record last month as exporters (including Vietnam and India) cut sales to guarantee local supplies, a stop-gap in case food riots reoccur, as they did in Haiti and Egypt a few weeks ago.

Checking the UBS site for food prices, I noted this ray of hope:

“The wheels are in motion for lower food prices,” John Reeve, associate director for agricultural commodities at UBS AG, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Farm output costs were below selling prices and harvests were due, he said.

Still we have a long way to go if we’re going to be able to feed six billions plus. I’m cautiously optimistic today, seeing that there are some kind of action being taken as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced he was forming a UN task force on the food crisis, bringing together heads of UN agencies to provide a coordinated response on the issue. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ordered a top level task force to take on the global crisis caused by rising food prices and urged key producer nations to end export bans. The UN chief said the immediate priority must be to “feed the hungry” and called for urgent funding for the World Food Program.

Food and water are essential elements that all human beings should have access to in order to live. Access to the minimum essential food & water are considered human rights. All else pales in significance.

Malthus’ gloomy prediction earned him the revulsion of people like his contemporary, writer William Hazlitt, who wrote:

when…that curious divine who surely has done more to discredit Christianity with the poor than all infidel writings put together, published his Essay on Population, he made himself conscience-keeper to the rich and great, especially to those of them who are not of a giving disposition, all in coining or at least popularizing for their use the magical phrase or formula ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant’ population.

There was an estimated 1 billion on the planet when Malthus penned his famous essay – up from 310 million in 1000 AD and 300 million in 0 AD. In the period to 1924, when the population grew to 2 billion, there was a remarkable advance in technology and fall in the death rate through improved hygiene. American historian David Christian says that in the last two centuries, humans have learned to tap the huge stores of energy buried millions of years ago in the fossilized bodies of ancient plants and microorganisms, and available today in coal, oil, and natural gas. These statistics indicate the astonishing ecological power acquired by our species in the course of its history.

Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who heads the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has warned that potential for danger from the rapidly growing biotechnology industry was increasing exponentially and urged creating global safeguards. Annan says rightly biotech crops are unsafe, untested and likely to enslave poor farmers to mega-corporations and expensive seeds. Annan says:

“We in the alliance will not incorporate GMOs in our programmes. We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds known to them.”

Historian David Christian writes that just to keep their bodies functioning:

 ”humans need about three thousand calories of energy a day. Ten thousand years ago, there may have been six million humans, each consuming at least this much energy, but not much more. Today, there are one thousand times as many humans (more than six billion), so we can be sure that our species now consumes at least one thousand times as much energy as we did ten thousand years ago. At the same time, each modern human consumes on average about fifty times as much energy as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago.”

I wrote in another food diary that if these figures are correct, they suggest that, as a species, we now consume about fifty thousand times as much energy as our ancestors once did. They demonstrate a control over energy that no other species can match.

Christian says that increasing human control over the energy and resources of the biosphere has measurable consequences for the entire biosphere. If one organism hogs so much of the energy needed to sustain the biosphere, less will be available for other organisms. So it is no surprise that as humans have flourished other species have withered. US stocks of wheat are at a 60-year low and world rice stocks are at a 25-year low. Poor weather patterns such as a long drought in the wheat-growing region of Australia, has cut output.

The rise in the price of oil has resulted in the US diverting 20% of its maize/corn production for biofuels and the European Union 68% of its vegetable oil production. The switch has boosted prices, reduced the supply of the crops available for food and encouraged the substitution of other agricultural land from food to biofuel production. In the long-term biofuel production using non-food crops may be viable, but the use of food crops in the US in particular has been both shortsighted and a cave-in to the farm lobby. President Bush wants the US to produce 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017. I hope President Obama will rescind this absurdity.

Consider the following: the rise in biofuel production in India and China may lead to shortages of water. A report says that both China and India are focusing on maize and sugarcane, which require large amounts of water, to boost biofuel production. Almost all biofuels used today make global warming worse.

Solutions: In a major speech, World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently called for a “New Deal” to address the world food crisis. He said,

 ”The realities of demography, changing diets, energy prices and biofuels, and climate changes suggest that high – and volatile – food prices will be with us for years to come.”

The food crisis is part of a complex and growing matrix of resource questions. But what we really need is political will, pure political will, not talk, not promises. The world leaders must work together and start issuing policy shifts that can help to ease the current crisis, including relaxation of biomass subsidies and repeal of the grain-export restrictions being imposed by the major grain-producing countries. That’s a start.

Poor water quality increases the risk of diarrhoeal diseases including cholera, typhoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery. Water scarcity may also lead to diseases such as trachoma, plague and typhus. Everyone needs water and everyone needs to take responsibility. Actively support governments, non-governmental organizations and private foundations which are making it a priority to deliver affordable good quality water to people. In short, do your part by conserving, recycling and protecting water more efficiently. Here are the news:

First, as an avid reader of all things published in pdf format, here’s an interesting one on water scarcity, commissioned by the UN and published in 2005, a good, interesting read and still relevant today.
Spain plans pipeline to avert Catalan water crisis:

Spain – Spain’s national government in Madrid, after much wrangling with the drought-stricken region of Catalunya (Catalonia), announced that a pipeline would be built to pump water from the Ebro River to the regional capital, Barcelona. It’s a reversal of Madrid’s former position, but Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega conceded that the situation was an emergency, since Barcelona will run out of drinking water by October. (Source: SignOnSanDiego by Martin Roberts and Sonya Dowsett)

Lake Albert rescue begins:

Australia – Earthmoving machinery is building a wall between Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina in the Australian state of South Australia prior to the pumping of water from Alexandrina into its dried-out neighbor. Andrew Beal of the government’s technical working group explained that artificially recharging Lake Albert was the only way to prevent falling water levels from exposing the lakebed and raising the concentration of sulfuric acid in the water. This would, in turn, threaten ecological collapse, he said. (Source: ABC News Online)
Four people killed in tribal clashes in Yemen:

Yemen – Four people were killed and five others wounded during clashes between two tribes in Yemen’s Dalei Province, reported national security officials. The dispute arose over the digging of a well. (Source: Saudi Press Agency)

Gila River on List of Most Endangered Rivers:

New Mexico – The Gila River, shared by New Mexico and Arizona, has appeared on American Rivers’ annual list of the country’s most endangered waterways. The environmental group pointed to a proposed water-diversion project on the upper Gila as a threat to both that river and its tributary, the San Francisco. In 2004, Congress approved the Arizona Water Settlements Act, which affirmed New Mexico’s right to take about 14,000 acre-feet of water from the two rivers. (Source: Albuquerque Journal)

Mauritius: The seawater desalination project is underway:

Mauritius – Preliminary work is underway to construct two seawater desalination plants at Pointe-Venus and Songes on the island of Mauritius (Ile Maurice). Commissioner Louis-Ange Perrine of Agriculture and Water Resources said that the projects will cost a total of 34 million rupees. Together, they’ll produce 1000 cubic meters of potable water per day and are scheduled for completion by the end of May. (Source: allAfrica.com by Anil Ramessur)

Govt rules speculators out of water trading:

Australia – The Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Australia’s Northern Territory announced that it would monitor the state’s fledgling water market carefully to be sure that out-of-state speculators didn’t jump in. Katherine farmers will be able to trade their irrigation licenses for the first time later this year. (Source: ABC News Online)

80% of groundwater in Sindh not fit for consumption:

Pakistan – Professor Muhammad Yar Khuhawar, project director of Sindh University’s High-Tech Resources Central Laboratories in Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan, revealed that 80% of the groundwater in the province is either too saline to be fit for human consumption or impregnated with arsenic. (Source: The News)

Not all bad news: West Africa – Hope revives thanks to Eau Vive

Burkina Faso – The French-based non-governmental organization Eau Vive, in partnership with the Regional Council of Sahel Unions (CRUS), launched three nutrition and water projects in Dori, Seno Province, Burkina Faso, on 12 April. They’re designed to alleviate potable water shortages and a lack of sanitation infrastructure in the rural communes of Mansila and Tankougounadie; to bolster food security in the area; and to build public latrines and a sewage treatment facility in Dori itself. (Source: allAfrica.com by Lassina Fabrice Sanou)

Melting Mountains A “Time Bomb” For Water Shortages:

Austria – Hydrologist Wouter Buytaert of Bristol University in England told a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna, Austria that global warming was melting glaciers and snowcaps earlier each year, creating “a time bomb” for the world’s water supplies. The sooner snowmelt runs off, the less is available during the summer when rainfall is lower and people need it the most, she said, adding that small glaciers could vanish in 30-50 years. (Source: New York Times)

Feds not addressing drugs in water:

Washington, D.C. – In Washington DC, a government task force responsible for devising a Federal plan to deal with pharmaceuticals in drinking water missed its deadline and failed to produce mandated reports and recommendations. White House spokeswoman Kristin Scuderi said that task force agendas and minutes were classified as internal documents and couldn’t be released at this time. (Source: Denver Post Online by Martha Mendoza)

The 2,500 pages report concluded that while advances over the last fifty years had resulted in the world’s food production increasing at a much faster rate than its population, the present system of production and trade meant the benefits were spread unevenly, and as we know, at intolerable price paid by the small farmers, workers and rural communities and of course, the environment.

“Malnutrition and food insecurity threaten millions”, the authors of the report wrote, “rising populations and incomes will intensify food demand, especially for meat and milk which compete for land with crops, as will biofuels.”

The report, commissioned by the UN and the World Bank, prescribed a fundamental rethink of agriculture knowledge, science and technology to develop a sustainable global food system. This report, launched by IAASTD’s Professor Robert Watson, fingered the hikes in food prices on the (now known) usual suspects: increased demand, poor weather (read Global warming), export restrictions, more land used to produce biofuels such as corn-derived ethanol, commodity market speculations, and good old fashioned panic buying and hoarding. Outlining some of the challenges facing world farming in the next decades, Professor Watson said: “We need to enhance rural livelihoods where most of the poor live on one or two dollars a day. At the same time we need to meet food safety standards, all of which must be done in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner.” Reading through one of the summaries, IAASTD’s co-chairman, Hans Herren, rightly notes that contentious political and economic stances are hampering attempts to address some of the imbalance, naming the OECD countries who are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or even subsidy systems. A cursory look at who’s who on the naysayers list does not surprise me: USA, Australia, Canada, Britain are among them.

However, in this report there are two salient points that are of considerable importance IMO, and long overdue, particularly gender equality: it strongly urges action to implement gender and social equity in policies and practices. Such actions include strengthening the capacity of public institutions and NGOs to improve the knowledge of women’s changing forms of involvement in farm and other rural activities. It also requires giving priority to women’s access to education, information, science and technology, and extension services to enable improving women’s access, ownership and control of economic and natural resources. Secondly, it questions the role of GM technology. The report’s authors are not convinced that GM technology as it is currently practiced could help in the battle against hunger. I quote: “Assessment of the technology lags behind its development, information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable.” Good call. The response from Roger Beachy, president of the US based Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and a strong advocate of GM technology was swift and unequivocal: “the over-precaution on the issue of GM in the face of strong scientific evidence to the contrary was partly to blame for the current world food crisis.” Naturellement, Monsieur Beachy, you have billions riding on this, do you not? Adding fuel to the fire, another executive, Tom Arnold of the European Food Security Group, maintained that GM may indeed form part of the future strategies to combat hunger. He says: “There has to be a potential in some of this gene technology to breed shorter cycle or drought resistant plants, for example.”  This GM debate will of course go on and intensify as time goes on. It’s worth noting that this week’s BioVision conference in Alexandria, a gathering where scientists, academics and representatives from the development sector discussed the role of life sciences in tackling problems in developing coutries, the GM issue reared its ugly head in several meetings.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said:

“Agriculture is increasingly reaching limits in terms of arable land and water availability, reduction in soil fertility and increasing environmental impacts. Modern industrial agriculture considers these impacts as extraneous even though the loss of ecosystem services undermines the very basis of what sustains agriculture. If our modern agricultural systems continue to focus only on maximising production at the lowest cost, agriculture will face a major crisis in 20 to 30 years time. There is a collective ignorance about how agriculture interacts with natural systems and this must change.”

Up until now, agriculture has been the domain of professional agriculturalists with a narrow focus on increasing productivity. IAASTD has brought in many other voices to create a broad vision that includes production, social and environmental dimensions. Food insecurity is not a result of lack of production but of the inadequacy of agricultural capacity to deliver food such as trade issues (and) the 40 percent loss of food, post-harvest, of which little is said about. Some 33 countries are presently in danger of political instability and domestic unrest because of rising costs. And  with the advent of the biofuels, many countries are seeing this as fuel and food being priced at equivalent levels, effectively stealing from the poor to subsidize the rich car drivers in developed states. Expect more anger in the near future from this inequality.

Above all, political will and commitment is needed to tackle these problems with the radicalism and imagination they need. It is high time the debate on agriculture was conducted on a more informed plane. I haven’t heard much from the candidates on these issues.

Over-population is another reason, but that’s for another diary.

Is this a sign of things to come? The answer is yes, because the world’s governments have so far turned a blind eye to this crisis. Was this discussed at Davos in any length? Yes, up to a point, as Evelyn Vaughn would surmise, as Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath warned that prices of some foodstuffs had doubled in his country. So when are we going to set up a food summit, we ask? Referring to the challenge of providing food at affordable prices, he said: “Next year in Davos we’ll be discussing this.” Next year! Once again, the Gods of procrastination are smiling. In the meantime, let them eat grass.

This is what eating grass looks like.

Although World Bank president Robert Zoellick also sounded the alarm, saying the cost of the basic nutritional requirements of people in many countries, mainly in Africa, was rising sharply, not much is being done. So let’s look at the main reasons behind this. Much has been discussed about the rise of Biofuels. It would be naive to blame rising costs solely on them (the chief financial officer of Brazil’s state-run energy group Petrobas, Almir Barbassa, argued that market forces were at work and farmers could not be told what to grow. Brazil is the world’s biggest producer of sugar cane, which is used to make the biofuel ethanol as well as sugar). More on Brazil below.

There are many factors behind the spike in world food prices. Australia, a major wheat exporter, has been in the midst of a severe drought for the last two years (Australia, which has a 15 percent share of the world wheat trade, is the second-biggest exporter of the grain after the United States) and the rise of China and India means that the majority of their population is moving from one meal a day to two, as it should; but the real culprit is no less than GW Bush, whose disastrous wars and incompetence have have weakened your dollar to an all time low. Since most commodities are priced in US dollars, and that means sellers are looking for higher prices to insulate themselves from the falling greenback, and that pushes staples beyond the reach of the world’s poorest.

Now let’s discuss the biofuels and its pros and cons.

The Pros: there are many eco-benefits to replacing oil with biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel (though it should be noted that bioethanol is vastly superior to biodiesel because it can be made from a wider range of raw materials and generates a higher yield and better carbon reductions). Since such fuels are derived from agricultural crops, they are inherently renewable. Additionally, ethanol and biodiesel emit less particulate pollution than traditional petroleum-based gasoline and diesel fuels. They also do not contribute to global warming as much, since they only emit back to the environment the carbon dioxide (CO2) that their source plants absorbed out of the atmosphere in the first place. I am sure that there are a few more reasons than the ones noted above, if you know of any, please comment.

The Cons: first, the many risks associated with them are environmental impacts of monocultures, increased rainforest clearance in developing countries for growing biofuel stock, higher costs than other forms of carbon reductions, harsh agricultural labor conditions, and increased use of genetically engineered crops, in other words, the ugly heads of Monsanto & similar companies strike again. Also Ethanol is ethyl alcohol, often referred to as grain alcohol; E85 is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. Since alcohol is a corrosive solvent, anything exposed to ethanol must be made of corrosion-resistant (and expensive) stainless steel or plastic, from fuel-injection components to the tanks, pumps and hoses that dispense E85, as well as the tankers that deliver it. That’s somewhat prohibitive.

Growing corn is an intensive process that requires pesticides, fertilizer, heavy equipment and transport. When considering the viability of ethanol, the total impact of all that activity needs to be taken into account. One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation’s 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won’t kick out fossil fuel dependence. It is worth noting that both the US and the EU use far less efficient biofuels production methods, mainly rapeseed in Europe and corn in the US. Science has shown that, environmentally, the advantages of rape and corn are marginal: for every unit of energy used in the production of ethanol from cane, eight units of energy are created. Corn and rape create less than two units of energy for every unit used in production, both with far lower carbon savings than cane. You could say that since both the US and the EU subsidize heavily ethanol production, thereby using the taxpayers money to pay farmers incentives to switch from food crops to producing an extremely inefficient and environmentally dubious fuel, which in turns exacerbate spikes in food prices.

Water: my last diary on water clearly denotes why scarcity of water was named by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a top priority and he warned that conflicts lay ahead if the provision of the vital resource could not be assured.

“Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon,” he said in a speech on Thursday. Ban reminded the gathering of the world’s wealthy powerbrokers in Davos that the conflict in Darfur in Sudan was touched off by a drought. “Too often where we need water, we find guns,” he said.

The Brazil connection: Brazil’s ramped up ethanol production has not had any impact on its food production, not as yet anyway. It’s one of the world’s few places with ample land available to be brought into agricultural production (and we’re not talking Amazon here, that’s not counting it into the equation). From the point of view of the Brazilian government, their principal source of ethanol is made from sugar cane which seems to be the most suited to mass cultivation. Problem is that it happens to be a chemical-intensive monoculture and can, in the future, set off a massive deforestation should the government decide to expand its program. Most Brazilians do not want to chop down their rain forests but it could well happen, unless the world’s governments come to their senses and address the biofuels conundrum.

Increasingly, poor farmers around the world are asking themselves why should they have to turn their food crops into fuel crops for the benefit of the world’s rich drivers, therein lies the rub.

As President Bush noted in his comments on the economy, “Prices are up at the gas pump and in the supermarket.”

Really? We hardly noticed!