World Bank: Food prices have entered the ‘danger zone’

(The Telegraph) Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, said food prices are at “a tipping point”, having risen 36pc in the last year to levels close to their 2008 peak. The rising cost of food has been much more dramatic in low-income countries, pushing 44m people into poverty since June last year.

Another 10pc rise in food prices would push 10m into extreme poverty, defined as an effective income of less than $1.25 a day. Already, the world’s poor number 1.2bn.

Mr Zoellick said he saw no short term reversal in the damaging effect of food inflation, which is felt much more in the developing world as packaging and distribution accounts for a far larger proportion of the cost in the advanced economies.

Asked if he thought prices would remain high for a year, Mr Zoellick said: “The general trend lines are ones where we are in a danger zone… because prices have already gone up and stocks are relatively low.”

Rising prices have been driven by the changing diet of the ballooning middle classes in the emerging markets. “There is a demand change going on, with the higher incomes in developing countries. People will eat more meat products, for example, that will use more grain.

“I am not suggesting that the improved diets in the developing world are the source of the problem but it means it takes longer to rebuild the stocks when you get a supply [shock].”

The problem has been exacerbated by “weather problems in Russia, Ukraine, North America, China”.

Making matters worse has been rising fuel prices, which go into fertilisers and energy.

However, he played down the impact of speculators on prices, saying only that “it can exacerbate some of the shifts”.

He also raised concerns about the food investment policies of some of the world’s wealthier nations in poorer countries. China has been buying up huge tracts of Africa to grow enough food to feed its growing middle class.

Using Saudi Arabia’s decision to scrap wheat production and invest overseas for food instead as an example, he said: “This raises sensitivities about the purchasing and investment and the land.

“We are now working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation on responsible principles for food investment – this has included sub-Saharan Africa, also some in central Asia – the idea that investment can be helpful and create additional food production, but one needs to do it in a way that helps the local people and meets local needs.”

The World Bank is investing $7bn in improving agricultural production, from seeds to irrigation to sewage. One key area of research is in developing better seeds.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8451684/World-Bank-Food-prices-have-entered-the-danger-zone.html

In Transition

‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun.

In the film you’ll see stories of communities creating their own local currencies, setting up their own pubs, planting trees, growing food, celebrating localness, caring, sharing. You’ll see neighbours sharing their land with neighbours that have none, local authorities getting behind their local Transition initiatives, schoolchildren making news in 2030, and you’ll get a sense of the scale of this emerging movement. It is a story of hope, and it is a call to action, and we think you will like it very much. It is also quite funny in places.

Magyar felirattal (with hungarian subs):

How do you feed eight billion people in a water-scarce world?

(The Ecologist) In an exclusive extract from his new book, World on the Edge, Lester Brown outlines fresh ways of thinking about water and land use in order to sustain the world’s growing population

Prior to 1950, growth of the food supply came almost entirely from expanding cropland area. Then as frontiers disappeared and population growth accelerated after World War II, the focus quickly shifted to raising land productivity. In the most spectacular achievement in world agricultural history, farmers doubled the grain harvest between 1950 and 1973. Stated otherwise, growth in the grain harvest during this 23-year-span matched that of the preceding 11,000 years.
This was the golden age of world agriculture. Since then, growth in world food output has been gradually losing momentum as the backlog of unused agricultural technology dwindles, as soil erodes, as the area of cultivable land shrinks, and as irrigation water becomes scarce.

The last thing our hungry world needs is more food

(dailymail.co.uk) Government chief scientist Sir John Beddington calls it ‘the perfect storm’. Soaring world population, coupled with climate change, is set to create a world food crisis and leave billions starving.

‘We are at a unique moment in history,’ he said recently, while launching a report from his Government think-tank, Foresight.

The Foresight project, Global Food And Farming Futures, says only a revolution in the way the world grows its food can save us. Clearly, David Cameron’s top boffin wants to kick-start that revolution.

The world’s population will reach seven billion this year and may peak at nine billion by mid-century. There are plenty of things wrong with the world’s food system. But the amount of food it produces isn’t one of them.

We already grow enough food to nourish nine billion people, probably 15billion people, in fact, for we eat only about one third of those crops.

Much of the global harvest feeds livestock  –  an inefficient route for delivering our nutrition, since it takes eight calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat.

Plenty more is diverted to make biofuels. An African could live for a year on the corn needed to fill one gas-guzzling SUV fuel tank with ethanol.

That’s not all. In the developing world, an estimated 30 per cent of the harvest is eaten by rats and insects, or rots in grain silos. We in the First World are better at preventing losses, but then we throw about 25 per cent our food away, uneaten.

The truth is that the world’s farmers could probably double the amount of food they grow  –  using GM crops and other technologies  –  and still people would go hungry. This is ultimately not about production or about human numbers, it is about poverty.

Every time there is a famine, it turns out later that someone, usually just down the road, was hoarding food for sale. The problem is that the hungry families didn’t have the cash to buy it.

Every few years we get news reports that there are only so many days’ supply of grain in the world’s warehouses. If the warehouses are full, prices fall and farmers stop producing. When they start to empty, prices rise, farmers start planting and soon the warehouses are full again.

Beddington’s ‘perfect storm’ is the operation of a perfect market. Does this mis-diagnosis matter? Even if we grow enough food, surely growing more can’t hurt.

Well, yes, it does matter. Because Beddington’s planned revolution stands a good chance of making the poor poorer. It could mean we have both more food and more famines. This is because most of the methods he suggests to increase food production are about big farms and big investment.

Government chief scientist Sir John Beddington’s planned revolution could mean we have both more food and more famines 

Beddington wants to plough up vast tracts of African cattle pastures and amalgamate the smallholdings of millions of peasant farmers to create giant, high-tech farms. His blueprint will take land away from the rural poor.

Last month, I watched this scenario playing out on the edge of the Sahara desert in Mali. The government there has recruited foreign experts to help it invest in agriculture. Western aid agencies are building irrigation projects to boost production of rice.

Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, Mali’s biggest sugar daddy, has just dug a 25-mile canal to irrigate an area of dry scrub three times the size of the Isle of Wight.

The trouble is that these projects will take water out of the River Niger. They will empty fertile wet pastures just downstream, where one million of Mali’s poorest people currently live by catching fish and grazing their cattle. They fear the plans will create desert.

Most of the rice from the new fields will go to feed Libyans. Meanwhile, the poor of the Niger wetlands are likely to join the Al Qaeda groups already penetrating the country’s desert borders.

Beddington is right that farming needs investment. But it has to be the right investment. Perhaps he should have a word with another of the Government’s scientific advisers, Professor Robert Watson, the real Whitehall food expert.

He is currently chief scientist at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Three years ago he chaired an international report on the future of the world’s farming.

In the developing world, an estimated 30 per cent of the harvest is eaten by rats and insects, or rots in grain silos

Watson reached rather different conclusions from Beddington. He said African smallholder farmers should be backed, not stripped of their land; that local knowledge of crops would often work better than high-tech methods; and that fighting poverty was the key to feeding the world.

Watson told me: ‘It’s not a technical challenge; it’s a rural development challenge. Small farmers will remain the predominant producers. The question is how to help them.’

Beddington sees the spread of Western farming methods and giant food and seed companies as the solution to the food problem.

Watson sees it as part of the problem. Beddington’s report says: ‘We need to make agriculture more efficient.’

But more efficient for whom? For agribusiness and its bottom line? Or for farmers and consumers? In an age where the smart investment banks are putting their cash into biofuels rather than bread, and where large corporations are buying farms across the developing world to grow cotton for cash rather than food for people, the two are not the same thing.

Beddington’s report chastises countries such as India, which imposed bans on food exports during the food price crisis in early 2008 in an effort to keep their people fed.

He blames them for ‘undoubtedly exacerbating’ the crisis, and says such protectionist actions should be banned. He has no such strictures for the speculators who caused the soaring prices.

Surely if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that unbridled markets can bring chaos, and speculators are a menace. It was bad enough letting the financial markets run riot. But if the food markets run riot we will have empty bellies as well as empty pockets.

Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1353810/Beddingtons-perfect-storm-Last-thing-hungry-world-needs-food.html