Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.

Monsoon failure threatens farmers

In India, right now, the monsoon is failing to deliver. Yes, there has been rain most days between June and now, but the actual rainfall has been only a quarter of the usual vast deluge. Around 80% of India’s agricultural land is close to drought conditions, and the monsoon rains will end in September. The fear is twofold: that the rains won’t arrive, and that they will, telescoping immense rainfalls into the last few weeks of monsoon and causing flash floods and subsidence. This year’s rainfalls, so far, are the weakest since 2002, and 2002 was the worst year for Indian agriculture for more than fifty years. Food security is fragile in a country with a young population, greedy for consumer goods, and unwilling to spend hours on cultivating subsistence crops.

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Between 16 and 18 November 2009, a World Summit to consider issues of food security will take place at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

The Summit has three interlinked aims:

• To reverse the downward trend of investments in agriculture by returning them to the  17% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) achieved in 1980
• To insure this investment works to remove hunger which is now considered to be a daily experience for more than one billion people
• To double food production for a world population set to reach nine billion in 2050.

Food in crisis, food as conflict

In addition to Summit meetings on these issues, there will be roundtables and break-out meetings on the relationship between financial and economic crises and food security (especially in light of the current global economic downturn), the governance of food security on an international and global scale (an increasingly troubling subject, especially for Africa where the relationship between richer and poorer nations can become strained at borders where ‘food migrants’ cross, particularly, at present, in the case of Zimbabwe) and establishing an early reaction fund for food security.

Invited guests will include Heads of State and Government as well as many FAO and UN dignitaries and representatives of advocacy and third sector groups, and the costs of the summit, which are estimated to be around $2.5 million, will be met by Saudi Arabia.  

FAO Director General, Jacque Diouf said, “I am very grateful to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, for his generous offer to fund this important meeting …There are more than a billion hungry people in the world today and Saudi Arabia continues to be at the forefront of the fight against hunger and poverty.”

African child with kwashiorkor, a hunger related condition, courtesy of venetia joubert at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Traditional farming is about to make a come-back across Uganda, according the country’s Agriculture Minister, Hope Mwesigye. Traditionally, Ugandan’s rich soil and fairly abundant rainfall allowed farmers to grow a range of staple foods, from plantains, cassava and sweet potatoes through to grains like millet, sorghum and corn as well as beans, and groundnuts.

Since the 1980s, the major cash crop in Uganda has been coffee, closely followed by tobacco, and then tea and cotton, although the ‘70s and ‘80s saw collapses in the infrastructure which meant that cotton and tea in particular lost their markets and farmers started to sell their staple crops for cash in regional and local markets instead.

Diversification was the message of the 1990s and many non-traditional exports were attempted, supported by the World Bank and the Ugandan Development Bank. So why now does the government want to return to traditional farming practices?

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During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’.  Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.

Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve

Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers.  The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years.

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Without much of a fanfare, the British government has launched an enquiry that aims to secure the future of UK food until 2050.  It’s a committee process, led by Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and it will explore how well equipped Britain is to contribute to feeding a global population of 9 billion in forty years. 

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The Challenge: Find biofuel crops that are “pro-poor.”

One Answer: Crops that can be grown with limited resources by small-scale farmers, can be converted to biofuel with existing cheap technology, and can simultaneously provide food, fuel, and livestock feed.

In my last post I discussed how agriculture could regain its rightful place as the keystone of civilization due to the rise of biofuels over the next 30 years or so. But, in what seems a ridiculously colossal conundrum, hundreds of millions of impoverished people worldwide could face starvation due to competition of fuel land with food land.

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In a wide-ranging session on Tuesday dealing with global biofuel, food security and poverty issues, there was plenty for the presenters to disagree about — but the one thing they could all concur on was that the biofuel genie is out of the bottle and he’s here to stay.

Several times during the session the presenters highlighted the fact that biofuels have finally brought an inherent value to agriculture that was previously missing. This, more than anything else, is why biofuels are not going to go away. Up to now, the lack of agricultural value has caused a deep deficiency in the level of funding and investment that governments worldwide have provided for their agricultural security and infrastructure.

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Now, mounting pressure from both Europe’s farmers and global food aid organizations have caused the high courts of various EU countries to reconsider.

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