http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1968&Itemid=594
Hungry World
Written by Marshall Bouton
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Developed nations should reform aid and launch a new Green Revolution
As the world still struggles to deal with the first truly global
recession, little attention has been given to the growing number of hungry
people and the possibility of mounting food crises in the years ahead.
According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are
now chronically hungry. Stagnant agricultural productivity, rising food prices
and now declining incomes, especially in much of Africa and parts of South
Asia, have brought the world dangerously close to humanitarian distress and
resulting social and political instability.
Surprisingly, while our world may be increasingly urban, the world of the
poor and hungry remains overwhelmingly rural. Of the 1.2 billion people in the
world living on less than a dollar a day, the majority, almost 700 million, are
small farmers, farm laborers and their families in Sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia who are unable to sustain themselves, not to mention rapidly growing urban
populations, due to decades of lagging farm productivity.
Most of the world's hungry people are women and children. Women comprise
80 percent of Africa's farmers, but they have access to only 5 percent of the
continent's agricultural land, credit and extension services, a key reason for
the region's average grain yield being one-fifth that of the US and Europe.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 55 percent of the global nutritional gap, with
devastating impacts on children's physical and mental development. Almost half
of all children in South Asia, most of them on farms, are underweight for their
age.
Why do we face such a crisis when it seemed so recently that the Green
Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had ushered in an era of food plenty?
Beginning in the 1980s the world turned its back on agricultural development.
The Green Revolution technologies of new seeds, fertilizer and farm practices
resulted in dramatic yield increases for irrigated crops, especially wheat and
rice, in settings with adequate infrastructure such as market roads, largely in
Asia. These breakthroughs created the false impression that the world's food
and farming problems had mostly been solved, when in fact the Green Revolution
had bypassed much of Africa and the dry-lands of South Asia.
As a result, international support and developing country investments in
agriculture declined sharply in the 1980s and the 1990s. Between 1980 and 2005,
for instance, foreign aid to low income countries for agricultural development
dropped from 17 percent of overall aid to 3 percent. By the 1990s, growth rates
of global public expenditure on agricultural research had been halved.
The rising global demand for food due to population growth and changing
diets (producing one pound of beef takes three pounds of grain) has outstripped
the growth in the production of staple food crops. Per capita production of
maize in Africa, for instance, has actually fallen 14 percent since 1980. The
projected increase of Africa's population by 2050 means that African
agricultural production would need to double just to keep the number of hungry
people at today's level.
To some extent the gap between food supply and demand has been met by
imports. Commercial grain imports by developing countries almost tripled
between 1990 and 2008. But the increasing dependence on food imports exposed
these economies, and especially their poorest citizens, to wide swings in the
world market prices. In the first half of 2008 grain prices doubled or tripled
in some countries. Since then prices have fallen by 50-60 percent in many
countries but remain well above their ten-year average, swelling the ranks of
the extremely poor, who spend 50-70 percent of their incomes on food, by at
least 100 million people.
These are dangerous portents for the future. Improving agricultural
productivity will become a more not a less, challenging task in the decades
ahead. The supply of readily arable land is diminishing in most developing
countries. Water scarcity is already a constraint in the semi-arid tropical
zones of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where pressure on the land is high.
According to the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
weather extremes including severe drought are likely to become more frequent in
those same regions. When the world recovers from recession, income growth and
dietary shifts will once again put demand pressure on the world's food supply.
But there is good news. We know how to increase agricultural productivity
and farm incomes - through a combination of adaptive agricultural research,
improved education and extension, and market development, all aimed at small
farmers, especially women farmers. A new generation of seeds and farm practices
and infrastructure improvements will make possible higher yields and increasing
farm incomes. A new Green Revolution can help. Though Green Revolution
technologies have been increasingly criticized as benefiting only larger farms
and harming the environment, later studies showed that small farmers benefited
as much. In fact, without yield-increasing technologies, the expansion of
agriculture into marginal lands would have wreaked greater environmental
damage.
What is required first and foremost is to put agriculture back at the top
of the global development agenda. We seem to have forgotten that no economy has
achieved sustained growth and graduated to middle income status without first
developing its agriculture.
There are promising signs of change. The World Bank has announced a new
focus on agricultural development in Africa. The G20 Summit in April 2009
addressed the need. Under NEPAD - the New African Partnership for Agricultural
Development - African nations have committed to devoting more resources to
improving agriculture.
The United States is moving to renew American leadership for global
agricultural development. President Obama has announced his support for
doubling US foreign assistance for agriculture. Legislation sponsored by
Senators Lugar and Casey proposes to overhaul totally US agricultural
development assistance.
But the second Green Revolution cannot be a carbon copy of the first. It
will have to be the result of a partnership between the donor countries, the
developing nations and international institutions, with goals defined by
African and Asian partners. It will also have to create public-private
partnerships with universities and research institutes, agri-business
companies, and non-government organizations committed to hunger and poverty
reduction. Organizations such as AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in
Africa funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, represent the highly
innovative approaches that can be realized by such partnerships.
The counter-productive policies of developed nations must also be
changed. US, European and Japanese farm subsidies distort world market prices
and undercut small farmers in Africa and Asia. European opposition to the use
of genetically modified seeds in African agriculture has hampered productivity
growth. The US practice that aid recipient countries buy US commodities with
the aid has the net effect of depressing local markets.
While the above policy errors need fixing, the shock of global food price
increases in 2008 holds out the hope that even in the midst of a great
recession, this most fundamental of human needs can once again become the focus
of global concern.
Marshall Bouton is president of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and
directed a recent Council-sponsored study of US global agricultural development
policy. This was written for Yale Global.
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