"How to feed the hungry billion" -- the Christian Science Monitor

By the editorial board of the Christian Science Monitor.

Before the global economic crisis, there was the global food crisis. Last year, soaring prices for basic foods sparked riots in about 30 countries. In June, the UN held a summit to tackle it. In July, the G-8 pledged to act. But in the fall, the floor fell out from the financial markets. Now, like a mountain of maize, countries' economic worries threaten to bury their concerns about rising world hunger.

Food prices have eased on global markets, but they remain high in many countries. Price volatility, the credit crunch, and shrinking coffers (both private and government) are making it harder for farmers to get loans to invest and plant.

At a follow-up conference on hunger this week, the United Nations announced that 40 million people joined the ranks of the "undernourished" in 2008, bringing the number of hungry people to nearly 1 billion – or roughly 1 in 7. Yet donor nations have delivered only a trickle of the $22 billion they pledged last year.

Meanwhile, food production must double by 2050 to head off mass hunger amid a global population surge from 6.5 billion to 9 billion, the UN said.

The world can solve this problem. In the 1960s, a technological "green revolution" in grain yields, irrigation, and fertilizers greatly increased food production, especially in Asia. Allowing communal farmers to earn and trade privately went a long way to alleviate hunger in post-Mao China. And economic growth and social programs have helped in Latin America.

But Africa stands stubbornly off the track of agricultural progress, and hunger still plagues many countries in South Asia. Climate change is expected to exacerbate production problems in these places, and once the world economy begins to recover, expect food prices to rise again as demand increases and more food is diverted to bio-fuels.

Once again, the world knows how to respond, but will it?

Tackling climate change, ending wars, and reducing agricultural subsidies that clog trade channels are three overarching needs. But they are also difficult to achieve.

Relatively quick and substantial progress can be made if nations rededicate themselves to international aid for agriculture, which has dropped from 13 percent of all development aid in the early 1980s to only 3 percent now. They must also better coordinate among themselves and with nonprofits.

Simply improving food storage could increase production by 30 to 40 percent in many poor countries, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Building roads could get more goods to market. In sub-Saharan Africa, just 4 percent of arable land is irrigated, compared with 38 percent in Asia.

Research needs a boost, too, as adapting pests, for instance, erode yields over time.

The FAO estimates that only $30 billion per year, invested in farm infrastructure and production, could eradicate the root causes of world hunger by 2025. That compares with the $825 billion stimulus package that the US Congress is debating.

Last summer, political momentum was building behind a UN effort to increase agri-aid, focus on small farmers, and better coordinate antihunger efforts. The momentum must be maintained.

"As famine looms in Ethiopia, only the neediest get food aid" -- by Nicholas Benequista, Christian Science Monitor

By Nicholas Benequista | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 27, 2008 edition

Hadero, Ethiopia - – One by one, the children are placed on a scale hanging from a makeshift wooden stand.

The mothers look pleadingly at the Doctors Without Borders aid worker, but he keeps his eyes on his clipboard, tallying the figures that determine whether each child is sick enough to eat today.

The scales in a rural clinic in Hadero, Ethiopia, are the latest indicator of the severity of the global food crisis.

There is only enough medicine and high-energy Plumpy'Nut peanut paste for the most severe cases. Outside, hundreds of hungry women and children throng the gates, desperate to go through the same brutal selection process, pushed back by guards brandishing sticks to clear a path for the next in line.

In this African nation, about 10 million people, more than 12 percent of the population, are now in need of emergency food aid after a drought wiped out harvests. But because grain is now twice as expensive as a year ago – if it is available at all – there is not enough food in Ethiopia to feed everyone in need.

Some aid workers are concerned that the combination of forces could force the country into the worst crisis since the infamous Ethiopian famine that killed an estimated 1 million people and was brought home to millions of television viewers across the world in the mid-1980s.

'Prioritizing' aid

Aid workers and government officials are thus forced to "prioritize," a harsh but necessary part of any relief effort, but rarely as grim a task as in Ethiopia at present.

"People don't know yet how widespread and severe the world hunger crisis is," says David Beckmann, president of Washington D.C.-based Bread for the World. "The gruesome things now happening in Ethiopia may be the first example of a country that's being pushed into a humanitarian crisis partly because of bad weather, but partly because of the high price of food and the high price of fuel."

The World Food Program, for example, is supposed to be doing its part by procuring emergency rations sufficient for 4.6 million Ethiopians, but because of rising expenses it only has the grain, oil, and corn-soya blend for about half that number.

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