Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN

Shaukat Masih, 35, is now struggling to feed his family

LAHORE, 9 April 2008 (IRIN) - Within the last month at least two cases have been reported in the press of parents killing, or attempting to kill, children they felt unable to feed.

On 21 March in a village near the industrial city of Faisalabad, some 117km west of Lahore, a jobless father, Abdul Shakoor, reportedly killed his two daughters, three-month-old Aliza Noor, and Kainat, aged four.

His wife and mother prevented him from attacking a third child before Shakoor committed suicide by throwing himself in the path of a train. His distraught family said he often talked of “giving away” his daughters due to the family’s crippling poverty and their inability to feed the five children.

In a similar incident in the southern Punjab city of Khanewal just three days later, a woman forced her six children, aged between six months and 10 years, to throw themselves into a waterway, and then jumped in herself. Khurshid Bibi, the wife of a labourer, was rescued along with four of her children. She later told police she saw death as a preferable option to ceaseless poverty.

“Shocking”

“These cases of parents killing children are shocking, but they give an insight into the socio-economic hardships people face,” said I.A. Rehman, the chief executive of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Shaukat Masih, 35, a labourer who earns U$50 a month or less, can understand the desperation of these parents.

“There have been days when there is no food to put before my children. It is a terrible feeling. Anything is better than watching small children sleep without food,” he said. Shaukat has three sons, but cannot afford to educate them. “We are lucky if we get two meals a day,” Shaukat told IRIN, adding that the recent rise in wheat flour prices seemed to be “leaving us with no alternative but to kill ourselves”.

Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN

The break-up of the joint family system has exacerbated the impact of rising food insecurity in the country

Nuclear families

Kaisar Bengali, one of Pakistan’s leading economists and researchers on social issues, who has headed institutions such as the Karachi-based Social Policy Development Centre, told IRIN: “If no measures are taken [on food prices] things will get worse.”

Bengali explained why he thought some parents were killing their children: “With the breakdown of the joint family system, the nuclear family is extremely vulnerable to economic stress. When families lived together, the loss of a job for one brother was not as disastrous as it is within a nuclear family when there is nothing to fall back on.”

Nighat Bibi, 26, knows just what he means. Nighat, who cleans homes, raises her three small daughters on an income of just $16 a month. Her husband is a drug addict and his family refuses to help her in any way.

“It’s a daily challenge putting even one ‘roti’ [flat bread] before my kids. I often go hungry for days so that they can eat,” she said.

Hoarding

Wheat flour (`atta’) is the staple for most of Pakistan’s 160 million people and supply has been erratic since December, partly due to widespread smuggling and hoarding.

The latest shortages to hit Lahore and surrounding areas this week, according to media reports, are said to have been created by speculative millers and retailers hoarding stocks in the hope that they can maximise profits by selling at a higher price in the near future.

“Flour is simply not available. It’s very difficult to manage without it,” said Mussarat Yusuf, 45, a domestic worker.

A Reuters report on 4 April cited a recent World Food Programme (WFP) survey which indicated that nearly half of all Pakistanis were at risk of going short of food due to sharp price rises.

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Photo: Phuong Tran/IRIN

Produce from desert-tested and cultivated free seeds

GOMGOM, 25 September 2008 (IRIN) - For 17 years, the Sweden-based non–profit Eden Foundation has been working with hundreds of farmers in one of Niger’s most arid zones to disprove the reigning logic that the desert is a tough place to nurture plant- and human- life through its research and free seed distribution.

Coordinator Josef Garvi told IRIN nature has abundant answers to Niger’s perennial food insecurity problems, but “people are not looking close enough. They look for quick answers, handouts from international aid agencies, big expensive hard-to-maintain irrigation projects, or programmes that help politicians look good, but do little to help farmers.”

On a budget of about US$100,000 a year, the 13-person Zinder-based team in eastern Niger, about 900 km east of the capital Niamey, travels a few times a week to its testing station more than 100 kilometres away to check on 68 plots of plants, divided by varieties, and years planted.

They have been monitoring these trees in a two-decade-long desert planting experiment.

Desert nursery

Eden tests its seeds by planting them in a 20-hectare former millet field, which Garvi told IRIN used to be a wasteland. “My father found the most undesirable piece of land with the theory that if seeds can take root here, they can be planted anywhere.”

Garvi dismisses plant nurseries that set up carefully-controlled water and light conditions that are impossible to replicate in the desert. “Our testing station is arid; we are working in one of the toughest arid zones in all of Niger [Tanout]. Rather than making farmers recreate nursery conditions, we found a ‘lab’ that most closely resembled farmers’ planting conditions.”

Garvi walks along rows of plants while his wife and three staff enter the plants’ heights and growth information into handheld computers.

Photo: Phuong Tran/IRIN

Trying to find seeds that can take root in desert

The seed test

The project pays 10 seed collectors who comb the desert country year-round looking for possible plants that can feed farmers. Garvi’s wife, Renate Garvi, trained as a tropical botanist, also gets seeds from abroad and puts both sets of seeds through what can turn into years of tests. “Once they pass our criteria of viability and produce fruit, and we are convinced they can hold up in Niger’s arid conditions, we distribute to farmers.” says Renate Garvi.

Since 1991, only 19 out of more than 100 seed varieties have passed the test to meet the three criteria: they can germinate, can survive and can bear fruit. Another 44 may soon graduate to distribution stage.

To date, no seeds from outside of Niger have made the mix given out to farmers.

Eden’s 2007 annual report states the organisation gave free seed packets to about 1,300 farmer households in the Tanout region.

The packets carry enough seeds to produce one tree, plus a measuring stick to help farmers distance their plantings. No fertilizer or water is needed. Each packet has picture icons instead of written instructions for the mostly-illiterate farmers.

A few kilometres from the testing station, farmer Mala Abdou says he has grown 600 trees since he started getting free seeds from Eden Foundation 17 years ago. “People used to say we could not plant trees,” says the farmer. “It was something only God could do. But we learned that man can plant trees also. I had never thought about growing trees before, concerned they would attract birds that could eat my millet.”

Other tree-planting programs in Niger, like the non-profit World Vision’s tree regeneration project, report how many Nigeriens think of trees as weeds, calling them “firewood” in the local Hausa language.

But tree-growing convert Abdou points out a local school around which he built a border of trees to protect the school from desert winds. “These trees also protect my millet. Before the winds would blow away the millet seeds,” says Abdou.

Rows of trees now tower over the millet, which Abdou sells. But Abdou keeps the sweet fruits he calls ‘danya’ in Hausa, and other leafy protein-rich vegetables that his trees bear.

With its sacred origins, and rumoured medicinal worth, farmers also plant maerua crassifolia, a plant that yields protein-rich edible leaves that go into sauces.

Photo: Phuong Tran/IRIN

Tree convert, farmer Mala Abdou

But the Eden team is reticent, almost tight-lipped, about what goes into the seed packets given to farmers, even shielding them from photography.

Garvi says other groups have incorrectly replicated Eden Foundation’s method and have wrongly criticised the method. “We are willing to share, but people need to do it correctly. This takes time. It is not something that will happen in one or two years.”

Can trees fight hunger?

According to the World Food Programme, almost 40 percent of the population in Niger suffers from chronic malnutrition, based on a June 2008 estimate.

Periodic droughts since the 1970’s have wilted harvests, killed livestock, and scorched the already-caked earth.

But Garvi says plants can adapt, pointing to Israel as an example of how plants can grow in extreme desert conditions.

When asked why Niger is still mostly barren of trees, Garvi looks out at the sparse tree-dotted horizon and replied, “People are blinded by what they think they know. There is un-captured potential and abundance here. But you have to really look for it, and then work for it.”

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Photo: Nicolas Gompel/ University of Wisconsin-Madison

Fruit flies similar to this one are responsible for export bans on fruit coming from areas where Bactrocera invadens (not pictured) have spread

DAKAR, 7 October 2008 (IRIN) - For years, farmers in one of Senegal’s most mango-rich zones, Keur Mbir Ndao, 80km east of the capital, were losing more than half their harvests. While some wrote it off to God’s wrath, researchers told them the cause was actually an Asian fruit fly, Bactrocera invadens, first discovered in Kenya in 2003.

According to the Nairobi-based International Centre of Insect Physiology & Ecology (ICIPE), if these flies are not controlled, they can wipe out crops and economies worldwide. Sunday Ekisi, the leader of the centre’s African Fruit Fly Program, told IRIN West Africa’s horticulture is particularly vulnerable: “The fragmented structure of fruit production, poor standards for phytosanitary management [agricultural goods crossing borders], poor management skills and lack of state and donor support makes eradication a difficult, if not impossible task.”

Ekisi said Africa-born flies can travel and endanger horticulture in other continents’ tropical regions.

In 2005, fruit flies ruined up to 40 percent of Africa’s two-million ton mango harvest, said Ekisi. “It is not just lost crops, but also loss of access to lucrative export markets abroad, which brings in much needed foreign exchange,” said Ekisi.

Three years later, Ekisi told IRIN, not much has improved:“The level of rejection [of African horticultural products] that has been witnessed the last two years as a result of Bactrocera invadens is enormous.”

Kenya is not able to export its mangos and avocados to several countries. Less Ugandan bananas are exported than before. Ghana’s citrus and avocados face the same fate. Ekisi estimated producers are losing 30-50 percent of their harvest value because of flies.

To tackle the problem requires a regional approach, but first, countries need to control the problem within their borders, said Ekisi.

Photo: Mamadou Alpha Diallo/IRIN

Mangoes infested with the fly larvae rot on the ground in Senegal’s Casamance region, destroying a source of income for the region’s farmers. [Date picture taken: 08/17/2006]

Senegal

The president of Keur Mbir Ndao’s Cooperative of Fruit and Vegetable Producers, Ama dou Diakhate, told IRIN Senegalese farmers were close to giving up in 2005: “People did not know how to deal with these flies and were ready to cross their arms in defeat.”

In 2005, Senegalese farmers produced 60,000 metric tons of mangos valued at almost US$10 million, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. But flies helped cut short the planting season by a month, with the last mangos harvested by 15 August.

In a country where more than 25,000 are directly employed by the mango industry, fruit flies threaten not only fruit, but also livelihoods, said the business development advisor for the US-funded Economic Growth Program, Dr. Patrick Nugawela: “The mango industry has a wide spectrum of people depending on it, so mango flies affect everyone across the spectrum, from the producer to the exporter.”

Starting in 2007, the program has worked with trade associations like Keur Mbir Ndao’s cooperative to fight back through a nationwide government led-Integrated Project to Control Fruit Flies.

In 2006 and 2007, producers had some relief with fruit fly interventions and the mangos lasted until the end of the rainy season in September. The extra month helped Senegalese farmers earn an extra US$5 million in mango money, according to export receipts.

In 2008, the Keur Mbir Ndao cooperative hired educators to show farmers that unkempt fields and rotting mangoes breed flies. They demonstrated how to attract the flies with things as simple as basil plants, and traps rigged with lady’s face cream or nutmeg- scents that attract the flies. They showed how neem oil, a natural vegetable oil, can control the flies.

Mangoes buffer price increases

Diakhate said the longer 2007 growing season helped some farmers in Keur Mbir Ndao buy an entire year’s worth of rice for their families at the end of the harvest: “If people didn’t have room to store the 50-kilo bags of rice, they would leave it at the store, and come by to pick up their rice supply monthly.”

Reflecting global price increases, the price of rice in Senegal has increased by 74 percent over the past two years, pushing members of some communities in the rice-dependent country into malnutrition, based on a July 2008 Ministry of Health report.

So far in 2008, farmers surveyed by the cooperative in Keur Mbir Ndao report, on average, an almost 70 percent increase in income over last year. Even so, Diakhate said people are not able to buy a year’s worth of rice as before. “We can afford to stock up only a few months. It is just too expensive now.”

And as of 7 October, Diakhate is still counting on producing more mangos. “We expect this harvest to last one more week.”

But he recognises the battle has not been won yet. “Not all mango growers are engaged in the fight. We are still losing about 15 percent of our harvest. We need to stay vigilant. The flies are smart. We have learned just how quickly they reproduce.”

And vigilance takes money, said ICIPE’s Ekisi: “Investment in fruit fly control can be enormous…it has to be a continuous process.”

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