Showing posts from category food security.
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IFPRI Launches First ‘Global Food Policy Report’
›June 27, 2012 // By Carolyn Lamere“The Global Food Policy Report is the first publication that represents the major, major food policy developments in the past year and the outlook for 2012,” said Director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Shenggen Fan in a video to promote the launch of the institute’s most comprehensive policy publication yet. The report is focused on regional developments, new research, debates, and legislation regarding food security both within individual states and at the international level.
A Guidebook for Policy
The 2008 global food crisis launched food security back onto the global agenda. A rapid rise in food prices contributed to instability around the world, and policymakers began to realize that access to food is an important security issue (high food prices have been linked to riots, for example).
“For 2012, food prices will remain very high and volatile, and some of the long-term trends like climate change, population growth, and demographic shifts towards more urbanized and higher income [populations] will continue to put pressure on global food security,” predicted Fan.
But the report notes that much of the fluctuation in global food prices is due to a lack of knowledge, not necessarily scarcity. The authors point to issues of preparedness and regulation as exacerbating factors and suggest that more detailed information, like that provided in the report, can help provide better solutions to policymakers.
Fan said that, by design, the report is “nontechnical, so the nontechnical person such as politicians, policymakers, practitioners, or anybody else who is interested in food security can use it as a comprehensive handbook.”
Making Connections Between Disciplines
The report draws on the expertise of dozens of authors who discuss topics ranging from biofuels to climate change. Rajul Pandya-Lorch, head of IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative, spoke about the utility of collaboration among different disciplines in an interview with IFPRI: “I think for me 2011 was the time when we began to realize that we cannot think of agriculture simply for agriculture; we need to think of agriculture as a way in which we can impact on other development outcomes, especially nutrition and health,” she said.
Kathy Spahn, president and CEO of Helen Keller International, a speaker at the launch event, agreed. “The development community is beginning to realize that achieving food security is about more than just growing more food. It is also about growing more nutritious foods and making sure these foods are available and accessible to the families in need,” she wrote for Helen Keller International.
Fan emphasized that although agriculture has become more prominently featured in discussions of development, it is important to continue to link it to other outcomes. “We must find new ways to exploit the links between agriculture and other sectors, including health, nutrition, water, and energy,” he wrote in the overview of the report.
Past Developments and Future Outlook
Several key developments are highlighted that shaped food security in 2011. Food prices were particularly volatile – rising for the first half of the year then dropping – which caused a renewed global emphasis on food from policymakers.
New players ranging from emerging economies to the private sector “are increasingly reshaping the structure and nature of the global food landscape,” write the authors. The G-20 is “claiming a growing role” to help manage economic issues, and states like China, Brazil, and India are becoming more vocal regarding global food policy. Partnerships between governments and private companies have also become more common.
These and other developments described in the report will have an impact into 2012 and beyond. The report points out that “food emergencies” caused by natural disasters like the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa will likely occur in 2012 as well, but also emphasizes that these cannot overshadow more long-term drivers of food insecurity, like land degradation.
The report describes four “high-priority areas of action” for this year. First, the G-20 should try to reduce price volatility (although some have argued volatility is less a problem than consistently high prices). Second, policymakers should work to improve agricultural production specifically through strategies like soil nutrient management which provide high yields but are more sustainable than high use of fertilizers. States should also ensure that the infrastructure necessary to make these strategies successful is in place. The next target is based on the Rio+20 conference, namely that participants should “integrate economic, social, and environmental sustainability efforts” to improve outcomes like nutrition and health. There were in fact several seminars on cross-discipline partnerships at the conference, and the importance of integration was mentioned in the outcome text that emerged.
Finally, the report calls for further collaboration across disciplines, in emulation of the internal IFPRI effort for the report which included a wide variety of expertise. The authors emphasized that though progress has been made, the challenge of achieving global food security will remain a concern for the near future, and cooperation across communities will be critical.
“The idea and the impact of the report is to make people aware of the problems that we are facing and the concerns…clearly the problem is not resolved and it’s something that we need to take very seriously,” said contributor Maximo Torero in an interview with IFPRI. “There’s a lot of work to be done to try to do this.”
Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CNN, Hellen Keller International, International Food Policy Research Institute, UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
Video Credit: IFPRI. -
Pop at Rio+20: Cairo, Rio, and Beyond
›June 18, 2012 // By Sandeep BathalaGreetings from Rio de Janeiro! I will be blogging from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development throughout the week, tracking the inclusion of reproductive health and rights in the agenda.
Population dynamics have significant influence on sustainable development but the two have not always been seen as connected.
This year’s conference is the follow-on to the original UN Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992 (thus Rio+20). The resulting documents from that conference – Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of Principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests – were adopted by more than 178 governments and have done much to set the sustainable development agenda over the last two decades. Population dynamics were largely left off the table and instead were taken on separately, and in parallel, at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.
This year, watchers from across the spectrum are eager to see these two issues talked about in a more integrated fashion. The official proceedings don’t start until the 20th, but side events have already begun.
At the first of Population Action International’s side events, appropriately named “From Rio to Cairo to Rio…and Beyond,” Eliya Zulu, executive director of the African Institute for Development Policy, said that virtually all development policies in sub-Saharan Africa cite population growth as an inhibitor to sustainable development and efforts to alleviate poverty, ensure food security, and preserve the environment. Furthermore, climate change is increasingly seen as a major threat to sustainable development in Africa. Policymakers in the region recognize the linkages between population, climate change, and sustainable development; however, little integration of these issues – operationally or conceptually – has been achieved.
Michael Herman, a technical adviser on population and economic development at the United Nations Population Fund, reminded audience members that demographic projections, like those predicting 10 billion by mid-century, are not destiny: population growth or decline is affected by policies, which should include human rights-based access to voluntary family planning.
Doris Mpoumou, an international policy officer at International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Western Hemisphere Regional Office, concluded the event by describing efforts to ensure that the Rio+20 outcome document being negotiated recognizes several key points. First, that population dynamics influence production and consumption rates; second, that population dynamics are relevant to the management of resources and sustainable development planning; and third, that population dynamics should be carefully integrated into development strategies and environmental planning with a focus on human rights.
Stay tuned here for more updates from Rio+20 and follow us on Twitter. I’ll be at every population-environment event I can get to and will also be visiting a favela with IPPF to see first-hand the ways Brazilians cope with the challenges of sustainable development.
Photo Credit: View of Rio de Janeiro from a mountain in Tijuca National Forest, courtesy of Michos Tzovaras/UN Photo. -
Nancy Lindborg, The Huffington Post
For Yemen’s Future, Global Humanitarian Response Is Vital
›June 12, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Nancy Lindborg, appeared on The Huffington Post.
This weekend in Sana’a, I had dinner with a group of young men and women activists who are on the forefront of Yemen’s historic struggle for a better future. They turned out for change with great courage last year, and at dinner, with great eloquence they outlined for me the many challenges facing Yemen during this critical transition period: conflict in the north and south, weak government institutions, cultural barriers to greater women’s participation, an upended economy, and one of the world’s highest birthrates. And, as one man noted, it is difficult to engage the 70 percent of Yemeni people who live in rural areas in dialogue about the future when they are struggling just to find the basics of life: food, health, water.
His comment makes plain the rising, complex humanitarian crisis facing Yemen. At a time of historic political transition, nearly half of Yemen’s population is without enough to eat, and nearly one million children under the age of five are malnourished, putting them at greater risk of illness and disease. One in 10 Yemeni children do not live to the age of five. One in 10. This is a staggering and often untold part of the Yemen story: a story of chronic nationwide poverty that has deepened into crisis under the strain of continuing conflict and instability.
Unfortunately, in communities used to living on the edge, serious malnutrition is often not even recognized in children until they are so acutely ill that they need hospitalization.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Nancy Lindborg is the assistant administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Sources: U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Informal settlements near the Haddjah governorate, courtesy of E.U. Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection. -
Re-Thinking Price Shocks and Conflict?
›“Conflict, Food Price Shocks, and Food Insecurity: The Experience of Afghan Households,” a paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s annual meeting, examines the relationship between conflict and food prices, using Afghanistan during the 2008 global food crisis as a case study. By examining per capita food intake, numbers of fatalities and injuries, and the number of violent incidents in a given area, authors Anna D’Souza and Dean Jolliffe, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and World Bank, respectively, determine that “at least in the case of Afghanistan, conflict does not seem to be the predominant driver of food insecurity.” Instead, inhabitants of conflict-prone regions, namely southern Afghanistan, consume more food, on the whole, than their northern compatriots. Residents of conflict areas do seem to be more affected by major food price increases, however these are fairly uncommon. D’Souza and Jolliffe speculate that this may be due to “interruptions in market access, inability to trade and barter, and worse food production and distribution systems.” These findings may be somewhat counterintuitive, but are an important resource for those seeking to reduce food insecurity in both conflict-prone and peaceful regions.In a working paper for the Center of Global Development, Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman upend much of the established thinking on the relationship between commodity prices and conflict onset. Past researchers have found that lower prices of agricultural commodities lead to conflict as civilians have less to lose by rebelling against the government, and higher prices of resources like oil and minerals can lead to conflict as rebel groups have greater incentive to seize control. Contrary to these explanations, however, Bazzi and Blattman find “no evidence of a consistent, robust relationship between commodity price shocks and political instability.” Even when examining states with higher risks of conflict, like those which are particularly fragile, ethnically polarized, economically unequal, especially poor, and/or located in sub-Saharan Africa, they find no correlation between price shocks and conflict. The only evidence of a relationship they find is that rising prices lead to rising incomes, which can hasten the end of a conflict, but even this correlation is weak and varies from state to state. Though currently only a working paper, Bazzi and Blattman’s research provides an intriguing counter-narrative: “We argue that errors and publication bias have likely distorted the theoretical and empirical literature on political instability,” they write. -
Full Extent of Africa’s Groundwater Resources Visualized for the First Time
›“In Africa, groundwater is the major source of drinking water and its use for irrigation is forecast to increase substantially to combat growing food insecurity,” yet, a lack of quantitative data has meant that “groundwater storage is consequently omitted from assessments of freshwater availability,” according Alan Macdonald, Helen Bonsor, and Brighid Dochartaigh of the British Geological Survey, and Richard Taylor of University College London, writing in Environmental Research Letters.
The authors hope to remedy this with new research presented in “Quantitative Maps of Groundwater Resources in Africa.” They used estimates compiled from geologic data and 283 aquifer summaries from 152 different publications to quantitatively visualize, for the first time, the full extent of Africa’s groundwater resources.
Tapping a Hidden Resource
The study estimates the scale of the continent’s groundwater resources at around 0.66 million km3. This volume, the authors explain, is “more than 100 times the annual renewable freshwater resources, and 20 times the freshwater stored in African lakes.”
Tapping into this massive resource is not always straightforward, however. The largest aquifers, and those most able to support high yielding bores, are concentrated in the arid regions of North Africa. The depth of these aquifers and their distance from major populations creates substantial economic challenges for extraction.
The geographic distribution of aquifers across sub-Saharan Africa is also quite variable, and local geology can determine not just the availability and accessibility of water but also its quality. For instance, geologic specificities can result in elevated levels of arsenic and other undesirable chemicals. Furthermore, “contamination…is common in urban areas from widespread and dispersed faecal effluent from on-site sanitation and leaking sewers.”
Tempering Expectations
Throughout Africa, “groundwater provides an important buffer to climate variability and change,” say the authors. But these buffers are not a singular solution to the threat of future water scarcity.
As the analysis shows, most aquifers, especially south of the Sahara, are unlikely to sustain boreholes of a higher capacity than that required by community-level hand pumps (one liter per second of flow at minimum). Yet, commercial irrigations schemes and urban towns typically demand boreholes greater than five liters per second, according to the study.
So, groundwater extraction may help communities and some small-scale farmers maintain access to water, particularly because many aquifers are found to possess the storage capacity required “to sustain abstraction through inter-annual variations in recharge,” however, “strategies for increasing irrigation or supplying water to rapidly urbanizing cities that are predicted on the widespread drilling of high yielding boreholes are likely to be unsuccessful.” Especially, the authors assert, where drilling precedes detailed local scale mapping of the available resources.
Sources: Environmental Research Letters.
Image Credit: Figures 1 and 3, courtesy of Environmental Research Letters. -
Poor Land Tenure: A Key Component to Why Nations Fail
›The murder of five land rights campaigners during the last two months – one in Colombia, three in Brazil, and one in Cambodia – have not captured many headlines, but they are a reminder of the central role land tenure plays not just in rural economic development but also in sparking broadly distributed economic gains throughout a society.
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Philippines’ Bohol Island Demonstrates Benefits of Integrated Conservation and Health Development
›In March 2012, I participated in a study tour to the island of Bohol, near the unique Danajon double barrier reef ecosystem – the only one of its kind in the Philippines and one of only three in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nowhere is the connection between population dynamics and biodiversity more evident than in the Philippines, one of the most densely-populated countries on the planet, with more than 300 people per square kilometer. Nearly every major species of fish in the region shows signs of overfishing, according to the World Bank.
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Improving Food Security Through Land Rights and Access to Family Planning
›“In a future world affected by climate change, population growth is one lever that can be addressed to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, particularly in the area of food security,” write Scott Moreland and Ellen Smith in “Modeling Climate Change, Food Security, and Population,” a recent study for MEASURE Evaluation and USAID. Moreland and Smith combine demographic changes, food needs, and economic capacity into a single aggregate model to assess how family planning and climate change might affect food security from now until 2050. Using Ethiopia as an example, the model finds that if access to family planning services were increased to meet existing needs, the subsequent decrease in demand for food would reduce child malnutrition and effectively counteract a projected 25 percent shortfall in caloric availability from climate change’s impact on agriculture. Programs designed to increase access to family planning should therefore be incorporated into national adaptation and food security strategies, they conclude. “Family planning, especially in countries with high unmet need, provides a potential solution not only for women’s reproductive health, but also for adapting to the effects of climate change.”The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on World Food Security recently endorsed a set of voluntary guidelines for land tenure governance in the context of food security that aims to strike a balance between encouraging productive investment and ensuring equitable and sustainable development. Population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation are putting pressure on the legal and cultural systems that govern land rights, resulting in “inadequate and insecure tenure rights” which can “increase vulnerability, hunger and poverty, and can lead to conflict and environmental degradation when competing users fight for control of these resources.” The guidelines, drawn from consultations with hundreds of people from both the private and public spheres and representing more than 130 countries, emphasize the need to safeguard access to land, fisheries, and forests – as well as the resources they provide – in a way that respects customary tenure systems, which are not always reflected in official tenure policies or records. They also emphasize strengthening the ownership rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups in order to enhance food security and minimize the risk of instability and conflict in the future.
