The EC-FAO Food Security Programme has just released two new e-learning courses on Food Security Policies and Vulnerability Assessment.

“Food Security Policies - Formulation and Implementation” describes Food Security Policies and explains when and why they are required. The course also describes the process of Food Security Policy formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

“Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis” provides a definition of vulnerability and illustrates the three critical dimensions used to define it. It presents the most commonly used methods for assessing vulnerability and provides examples and criteria for selecting appropriate vulnerability indicators.

Both courses include resources for trainers which can easily be adapted by institutions to suit their own training needs.

Photo: Mamadou Alpha Diallo/IRIN

The smallest member of the millet family, fonio can grow in even abandoned fields like this one in Casamance, Senegal

DAKAR, 17 October 2008 (IRIN) - Despite growing for centuries in some of the driest, toughest agricultural zones of West Africa, the fonio cereal has been neglected by most agricultural development programmes, according to the World Bank. But skyrocketing rice price increases that have slammed rice-dependent West Africa and declining profits in other cash crops like cotton have some local producers turning back to the ancient cereal.

But Olivier Durand with the World Bank in Mali told IRIN fonio has some hurdles to clear before reaching store shelves: “Its main drawback is the very difficult post-harvest process, as it is a very small grain. There’s a market for pre-cooked fonio, but prices are still pretty high due to the low productive post-harvest process.”

The average cost for a 1-kg package of pre-cooked fonio is US$2, twice as much as raw fonio, according to the US-funded Economic Growth Programme, which is trying to revive fonio production in Senegal. This price is about as twice as expensive as one kilo of the more commonly-consumed, but less protein-packed, rice.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates an annual production of about 250,000 tons of fonio grown on 380,000 hectares of land in lead-producing country Guinea, followed by Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast.

But producers in other countries are trying to get in.

Senegal

In Senegal, the mostly female cooperative, Yakaar Niani Wulli [the hope of villages Niani and Wulli, in the national Wolof language] of small-scale farmers in southern Senegal has been trying to plant and sell fonio.

The cereal fell out of vogue when families had more money to buy rice imports, said organic food biochemist Malik N’diaye with the Senegalese non-profit Environment, Development Action in the Third World (ENDA).

Because of its smaller-than-couscous size, de-husking and cleaning can take up to five poundings, an estimated one hour to mill less than 2kg. Fonio evokes rural images of a woman standing over a mortar pounding the seeds with sand, and then – sometimes unsuccessfully – separating sand from the grains.

But the World Bank’s Durand said relief is on the way: “New techniques will improve the productivity while reducing the work hardship for women.” He added the food crisis may give overlooked cereals like fonio more attention.

“My fear with fashion and ‘revivals,’ said Durand, “[is] that one will consider this is one [and only] solution, the key revolution and miracle, [but it is]…one among other solutions to the answer the food security issue.”

FAO reports rice prices quadrupling worldwide in the past two years. In West Africa, only Burkina Faso is a cereal exporter, according to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, which stated hunger levels are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world.

ENDA’s Ndiaye told IRIN this is the same area where fonio freely grows: “Fonio can grow in arid zones, a plus for the drought and famine-prone Sahel.”

Finding a market

In 2007, the US-based Economic Growth Programme facilitated a tasting event of organic fonio in Koussanar, the Senegalese rural birthplace of the cereal located about 400km east of the capital Dakar. An American export company bought two tons of the pre-cooked fonio cereal from the federation, which was the federation’s lone export last year.

The production group is expected to harvest 20 tons from 60 hectares in 2008, with 10 tons to be sold and the other half reserved for local consumption.

The federation of about 2,000 members is trying to buy a husking machine to make their work quicker and to increase production, according to ENDA.

ENDA’S N’diaye told IRIN the time has come for people both in and out of West Africa to rethink the cereal: “It may be arcane because it has been around for so long, but it has medicinal properties able to fight diabetes, which has sparked recent interest.”

According to the French agricultural research centre working for international development (CIRAD), fonio is an amino-packed, easily digestible, easy-to-grow desert food.

N’diaye said locally, fonio is known mostly as the first dish a newlywed wife is required to cook for her husband. But it could be much more, he said: “It should also be known as a nutritious, protein-packed organic speciality good. It is old, but also new.”

27 October 2008, Rome – Communities in Haiti suffering severe food insecurity are to be assisted by a US$10.2 million package which will quickly boost Haiti’s battered agriculture sector.

The funds come at a time when Haiti is facing the double challenge of recovering from recent hurricanes, which the government estimates have caused at least US$500 million in losses, and feeding its people, many of whom were facing food shortages even before the storms struck.

The agreement was signed on 22 October 2008 between the Government of Haiti, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is providing the funding.

In Haiti IFAD’s US$10.2 million is being implemented through the FAO’s recently-established Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP), part of a larger package of assistance to poor smallholder farmers.

The cows and pigs dotting the flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.

That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow’s ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.

Rising in the fields of the environmentally conscious Netherlands, the Sterksel project is a rare example of fledgling efforts to mitigate the heavy emissions from livestock. But much more needs to be done, scientists say, as more and more people are eating more meat around the world.

A three-day pan-African ministerial Conference pledged today to promote water development throughout the continent to fully exploit Africa’s agricultural and hydroenergy potential.

In a final Declaration, the Conference, on Water for Energy and Agriculture in Africa: the Challenges of Climate Change, noted that water is a key resource to economic and social development as well as to hunger and poverty eradication in Africa, and that food and energy security are prerequisites for the development of Africa’s human capital.

The Conference, which brought together ministers from 53 African countries, recognized that the challenges faced by the continent concerning food security, achieving the Millennium Development Goals, increased energy demand and combating climate change required all countries to move together.

Photo: V. Schoehl/IAEA

The IAEA along with FAO help develop crop varieties that thrive in an environment suffering from the impact of climate change

JOHANNESBURG, 5 December 2008 (IRIN) - Gloomy predictions of less food in Africa and Asia in another decade as a result of climate change and low investment can be turned around with a little help from nuclear science, says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It’s just a matter of exposing seeds of staple grains to radiation to induce desired changes in plants, making them resistant to drought, to certain diseases, or [giving them] an ability to thrive in saline soil, said Chikelu Mba, Head of the Plant Breeding Unit of Agriculture and Biotechnology Laboratory at the IAEA. The laboratory is run jointly with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

If countries cannot afford access to “radiation breeding”, the IAEA will do it for them at no charge. So why has it not solved the world’s food crisis?  “Few people are aware of these facilities,” said Mba.

In a year when food shortages have combined with rising demand to create a new global food crisis, the IAEA and FAO were “calling for a revival of interest in this safe, cost-effective and proven technology, especially for producing crops that are adapted to the consequences of the burgeoning climate change and variations such as drought, flooding, salt pollution and extreme weather conditions,” Mba said.

“Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with more vulnerable agricultural systems, stand to benefit most from the routine integration of radiation-induced mutations in their national crop improvement activities. It is our opinion that there is no reason why the results of the use of this technology in Asia and Europe couldn’t easily be replicated in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Fiddling with the blueprint

All species have a blueprint, called the genome, which determines a variety of actual and potential characteristics; for instance in plants it controls height, yield, susceptibility or resistance to disease, and many others. But only a few of the many possibilities get the opportunity to develop. A plant can adapt to different conditions through a process of spontaneous mutation and natural selection.

It was the survival of certain edible plants in adverse conditions that first attracted hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago, said an IAEA press release. “They selected the robust, easy-to-harvest wild grains, consumed the crop and saved the seeds for planting the following year. Modern plant breeding was born.”

Plant breeding can be done in several ways. A breeder looking for pest resistance, for example, might find the characteristic in a wild variety that has poor quality and yield. This will be crossed with a plant that has good quality and yield, and any offspring with the desired traits will then be selected and propagated. The process can take seven to ten years, whereas spontaneous mutation occurs naturally and can take very much longer.

“We call spontaneous mutation the motor of evolution. If we could live millions of years, and survey billions of hectares of land with 100 percent precision, we would find variants with all of the traits we’re looking for, but which have mutated naturally,” said Pierre Lagoda, Head of the FAO/IAEA Joint Division’s Plant Breeding and Genetics Section.
 
“But we can’t wait millions of years to find the plants that are necessary now if we want to feed the world. So, with induced mutation we are actively speeding up the process.”

In induced mutation, scientists apply mutagens — for example, gamma rays or chemicals — to accelerate the process. Unlike genetic modification, which introduces new material into a plant’s genetic makeup, induced mutation accelerates the natural process of spontaneous changes occurring in plants, the IAEA press release explained.

Exposure to radiation makes minute changes in a plant’s blueprint, creating a variant that is different from the parent plant. A number of variants are produced in the search for desired traits. Those that seem promising are selected and given to plant breeders, who work to incorporate that quality, perhaps by cross-breeding, into unmodified plants.

If countries cannot afford access to “radiation breeding”, the IAEA will do it for them at no charge

Induced mutation also provides a solution to bottlenecks in classical plant breeding, in which hybrids - the product of crosses - are only as good as the source parents.

“With many decades of monocultures, the variations amongst candidate parents have become very narrow. This endangers food security, as resistance to yet latent biotypes of pests and diseases and extreme weather conditions may have become severely eroded. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to prospect for plant genetic resources across national boundaries,” the IAEA noted.

Millions of variants are produced by induced mutation, and breeders then have to screen for the desired traits and crossbreed. Nature can help this process: if improved varieties are planted in a diseased field, the survivors will be the resistant ones.

Because fewer pesticides are needed for disease- and insect-resistant crops, they are more environmentally friendly and reduce the production costs of poor farmers.

Still some resistance

Radiation breeding faces some resistance, and there has been public concern over words like “radiation” and “mutation”. “I understand that people are suspicious of these technologies, but in our case it’s important to understand that in plant breeding we’re not producing anything that’s not produced by nature itself,” said Lagoda. “There is no residual radiation left in a plant after mutation induction.”

The IAEA has been working on radiation breeding for the past 44 years, said Mba, and has had successes. In the mid-1990s the IAEA and counterparts like the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute in Vietnam had an important breakthrough with the introduction of the “VND series”, a variety of rice that was shorter, which prevented the crop from falling over, and also made it easier to harvest.
 
The latest variety, VND95-20, is now grown on 30 percent of the Mekong Delta’s one million hectares of rice-growing area, and is the most widely used rice in Vietnam. It thrives in the delta’s saline conditions and has good resistance to a major insect pest, the brown plant hopper. 

Another variety in the series, VND99-3, can be harvested three times a year, and within 100 days of planting the seeds, greatly improving food security for Vietnam’s 84 million people. 

IAEA scientists are collaborating with plant breeders in several African countries, using nuclear techniques to improve the safety of cassava and enhance its nutritional content, yield and resistance to disease.

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

Food prices will continue to remain high

JOHANNESBURG, 9 December 2008 (IRIN) - The food price crisis of 2008 will continue into 2009 and might get worse, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The 2008 food crisis has already pushed 40 million people into hunger, bringing the number of undernourished in the world closer to a billion.

FAO economists made the gloomy prognosis at the release of their ninth progress report, State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008, since the 1996 World Food Summit on world hunger.

The authors warned that the situation in the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC), which recorded most of the increase in the number of hungry people because of widespread and persistent conflict, could get worse. Between 2003 and 2005, the number of hungry in the DRC rose from 11 million to 43 million, and the proportion of undernourished rose from 29 percent to 76 percent.

Many countries are finding the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015 more difficult to reach.

“The first scenario, which is the more positive scenario, is that the food production levels [in 2009] will remain the same as they were this year [2008],” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a grains expert at FAO. 

A second scenario appears more likely as farmers are expected to plant less resulting from mixed signals “because of the [effect of the 2008] global financial crisis on the 2009 price projections for fuel and other inputs, as well as the expected price of any staple grain next year [2009].

“It is all rather unpredictable at this stage.”

Food is not going to get cheaper soon; prices of major cereals have fallen by over 50 percent from their peaks earlier in 2008 but are still high compared with previous years, the FAO report noted. Despite a sharp decline in recent months, the FAO Food Price Index was still 28 percent higher in October 2008 than in October 2006.

The prices of agricultural inputs have more than doubled since 2006, so poor farmers could not increase production. Richer farmers, particularly those in developed countries, could afford the higher input costs and expand plantings. As a result, cereal production in developed countries was likely to rise by at least 10 percent in 2008, while the increase in developing countries might be less than 1 percent.

Where the hunger has grown

Studies have shown that particularly critical levels of undernutrition occur when undernourishment exceeds 10 percent in the total population. “This will not only lead to more frequent outbreaks of diseases, but affects the capacity of people to work and earn a living,” said Mark Smulders, an agricultural economist at the FAO.

Africa is home to 16 of the 17 countries - DRC, Eritrea, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Central African Republic, Rwanda, Chad, Liberia, Mozambique, Togo, Madagascar and Tanzania - where the prevalence of hunger already exceeds 35 percent of the population, making them particularly vulnerable to higher food prices.

Most of the world’s undernourished people - 907 million - live in developing countries, according to the 2007 data in the report; of these, 65 percent live in only seven countries: India, China, DRC, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

Yet the news is not all bad. Overall, sub-Saharan Africa has made some progress in reducing the proportion of people suffering from chronic hunger, from 34 (1995-97) to 30 percent (2003-05).

Ghana, Congo, Nigeria, Mozambique and Malawi have achieved the steepest drop in the proportion of undernourished people. Ghana is the only country that has reached both the hunger reduction target set at the World Food Summit and the MDG on hunger. Growth in agricultural production was key to this success, the report noted.

Latin America and the Caribbean area were most successful in reducing hunger before the surge in food prices. High food prices increased the number of hungry people in the sub-region to 51 million in 2007.

Countries in the Near East and North Africa have generally experienced the lowest levels of undernourishment worldwide, but conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with high food prices, pushed the numbers up from 15 million in 1990-92 to 37 million in 2007.

Tackling hunger

During the June 2008 FAO Food Summit in Rome, a two-track response to the crisis was put forward: boost production by investing in the agricultural sector and rural development; ensure immediate access to food for the poor and vulnerable in both rural and urban areas by providing social safety nets and protection measures.

The investment track called for a lot of donor aid. “During the FAO Rome Food Summit in June, several billions of dollars were pledged by world leaders towards agricultural development – little of that had materialised,” said Abbassian.

“In fact, in the last few weeks, the world has witnessed trillions of dollars being lost in financial markets, forcing governments to spend even more trillions on propping them up. Overcoming the financial crisis is critical, but continuing the fight against hunger by realising those pledged billions is no less important.”

The European parliament recently approved a US$1.2 billion facility over a three-year period from 2009 for rapid response to soaring prices in developing countries, which was a step in the right direction, said the FAO economists.

The report suggests other measures to boost nutrition levels: governments should support small-scale food industries to produce infant weaning foods of good nutritional quality; promote breastfeeding; provide education messages on adequate nutrition; and conduct growth monitoring.

“Evidence that emerged from Bangladesh in the 1990s suggests that macroeconomic food policies that keep the price of food staples low, can, in combination with other food and nutrition interventions, help reduce the percentage of underweight children,” the FAO report said.

Governments should also underline investment in small-scale farms. About two-thirds of the world’s three billion rural people live off the income generated by farmers managing some 500 million small farms of less than two hectares each.

Impact of traditional market turmoil

The recent turmoil in traditional asset markets has had an impact on food prices, according to the FAO, as new types of investors became involved in derivatives markets based on agricultural commodities in the hope of achieving better returns than those available from traditional assets.

Global trading activity in futures and options combined has more than doubled in the last five years. In the first nine months of 2007 it grew by 30 percent over the previous year, and some analysts have said the increased speculation was a significant factor in soaring food prices.
 
“However, it is not clear whether speculation is driving prices higher, or whether this behaviour is the result of prices that are rising in any case,” said the FAO report. “Either way, large inflows of funds could partly account for the persistence of high food prices and their increased volatility.”

Photo: Train4dev

The cereal leaf miner attacks wheat and other cereals

DUBAI, 8 September 2008 (IRIN) - The Ministry of Agriculture has launched a campaign against the cereal leaf miner (Syringopais temperatella) in Karak, 140km south of Amman, officials said, in a bid to help farmers curb a possible infestation of the pest, which attacks wheat and other cereals.

[Read this report in Arabic]

“We expect 25,000-30,000 dunums [1 dunum = 1,000 sqm] of land to be infected in Karak,” Aktham Mdanat, director of the Karak Agriculture Department, told IRIN. “It is vital to enlighten farmers about pre-cultivation measures and to start pesticide spraying immediately,” he said.

The Karak governorate is expected to plant 90,000 dunums of wheat this year, said Mdanat.

Cereal leaf miner, first reported in Jordan more than 50 years ago, threatens wheat and barley crops mainly in the south because of drought and a lack of proper crop rotation.

The National Centre for Agriculture Research and Extension (NCARE), with the Karak Agriculture Department, opened three farmer field schools (FFSs) this summer in the governorate, which will disseminate information about fighting the worm. The project is supported by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“The schools are held in the areas of Southern Mazar, Kasbet Al-Karak and Al-Qasr. Each school includes 15 farmers who meet regularly to discuss agricultural issues and do experiments in the field,” said Nayel al-Kawalit, FFS supervisor at the Ministry of Agriculture.

“Karak Agriculture Department is also planning extension campaigns in October against the cereal leaf miner. It is the time when farmers start ploughing to prepare their land for sowing wheat in November and December,” Mdanat said. The worm starts to appear in late January.

Deep ploughing exposes the larvae to the sun and helps kill a good number of them. As soon as the worm is detected [late January and February] pesticide should be sprayed.

Fighting cereal leaf miner

“Deep ploughing exposes the larvae to the sun and helps kill a good number of them. As soon as the worm is detected [late January and February] pesticide should be sprayed,” Mdanat said.

“Last year, the worm infected vast tracts of land but following these methods, we were able to save 95 percent of the infected fields,” he said.

Pesticide spraying and ploughing are effective only if done at the right time, according to Hanna Mdanat, insect specialist at NCARE, Rabba Department. “We are working on resistant and disease-enduring strains of wheat to plant in the future,” he told IRIN.

Drought

The pest has also been detected the past few years in Ar Ramtha in the northwest but did not infect vast fields as it did in the south. “Drought had hit the southern areas and such conditions trigger worm infestation,” Hanna Mdanat said.

“In addition, farmers in Karak plant the same crop in the infected land every year. It is important to adopt the three-year cycle to break the lifecycle of the worm,” he said. Lentil and chickpea rotate with cereal, principally wheat.

According to Aktham Mdanat, Karak plants 150,000-160,000 dunums of cereals every year and produces a good part of the kingdom’s output. “The governorate has a population of 200,000 people and 70 percent of them work in agriculture,” he said.

According to a Ministry of Agriculture official, Karak produced 7,388 tonnes of wheat in 2007 of the 39,485 tonnes produced nationwide during the year.

From self-sufficiency to importer

Jordan was once self-sufficient in wheat production and an exporter. However, since 1988 it has been importing the cereal. About 40,000 tonnes were locally produced in 2007 against 1,011,110 tonnes imported the same year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Drought, the loss of agricultural land due to expanding urban areas and poor methods of fighting plant diseases are some of the reasons for the decline, according to specialists. Agricultural land has shrunk and cannot meet the food demands of the increasing population of 6 million people.

At the World Food Summit in held in Rome in June, the FAO said Jordan was one of seven countries that were highly vulnerable to rising food costs. The others are the Gambia, Liberia, Mauritania, Niger, Moldova and Zimbabwe.