Professor Douglas Kell is the Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) in the UK and he says that without an additional £100m a year being spent on crop research in Britain, there could be food riots in developing countries as the growing world population fails to find enough affordable food.

Investigating improvements in crop yields is one way that the developed world could help to secure food supplies for the planet as a whole. And, he claims, the UK would see economic benefits from this research investment.

To put the research cost into proportion, Kell says that the £100 million that BBSRC seeks would increase its budget by nearly 50% but is still only around the same as one day’s expenditure on the disastrous Foot and Mouth epidemic in the UK in 2001. This is a timely warning for a world teetering on the edge of panic related to the swine flu or (as US farmers would prefer) H1N1 virus which may soon be declared a pandemic.

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Kenya’s

A prolonged dry spell, verging on drought, has left a third of the population, about ten million people, requiring food aid. This is now considered a national emergency. Until this week,  importers had to be approved by the agriculture ministry before being allowed to bring in maize and millers had to register with the ministry to be licensed to buy maize from the national cereals board and convert it to cornmeal. Kenya has recently imported more than  22,000 tonnes of maize from South Africa, but this is a small percentage of the amount it will need to replace the crops destroyed in 2008’s post-election violence.

Food rotted while people rioted

Some crops were burned, and many storage facilities and shops were looted, often losing seed crops for the following years harvest. Many small farmers, particularly those producing high value soft fruits such as passion fruit, were unable to get their harvest to market because of blockades or curfews and so had to feed their crop to livestock or allow it to rot. Now, with the cost of maize flour doubling in less than a year and with corn meal being a staple in Kenyan cuisine, the food aid programme is becoming an necessity even for the middle-classes.

It’s not only the post-election crisis that’s caused the problem: just as in the rest of the world, rising fuel costs have given Kenyan farmers a headaches. In 2008, diesel was 60 shillings (0.98 dollar) per litre – this month it’s 100 shillings (1.63 dollars) a litre with no sign of the price dropping.

Failing crops could destabilise a fragile region

With stem rust already damaging Kenya’s second largest cereal crop: wheat, this once powerful economy, proud of its links to the new American president, is starting to look as damaged and in need of help as its fragile neighbours.

Maize cooking courtesy of Luigig at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Consumers in the United States struggle with prices rising as much as forty percent for grains and twenty-five percent for eggs, eighty percent for dairy and double-digit increases for other staples. The situation has led to a record number of individuals seeking assistance from food banks nationwide. Globally, however, the crisis has taken on life and death consequences.

As prices have risen, fifty and even three hundred percent in areas like Sierra Leone, these areas have experienced food riots. The growing lists of nations that have had food price protests and riots in the last six months includes Mexico, Haiti, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cameroon, Yemen, Indonesia, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

The situation resulted from what some experts call “a perfect storm” of factors combined; oil prices, the use of farmland for ethanol instead of food, Australia’s drought, crop disease, climate change, U.S. economy, and the growth of a more meat-intensive diet worldwide.

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