It may not be many years away
December 28 [Mon], 2009, 12:19
It may not be many years away. In the first ten months of this year, food prices rose by 9.8%, prompting fears of a resumption of the surge that began in 2007, the first of the two years of crisis (see chart, left). The “breakfast commodities” (tea, cocoa, sugar, important sources of calories in some parts of the world) are trading at their highest levels for 30 years.
Tiffany BraceletsWorse, the price respite, while it lasted, did nothing for the poorest and most vulnerable. According to the FAO, the number of malnourished people in the world rose to over 1 billion this year, up from 915m in 2008 (see chart, below). Economists at the World Bank reckon that the number living on less than $1.25 a day will rise by 89m between 2008 and 2010 and those on under $2 a day will rise by 120m. A quarter of a century after a famine in Ethiopia which dramatised failings in the food system, famine is again stalking the Horn of Africa. Has anything been done to prepare for future food shocks?
Certainly, say most governments. Money is starting to pour into agriculture after 30 years of neglect. There has been a spasm of institutional reform. And public and private sectors are doing more to help farmers than ever.
At their meeting in L’Aquila in July, the Group of Eight (G8) large rich economies promised to increase spending on agricultural development by $20 billion over the next three years. Not much of this was new money (probably $3 billion-5 billion) and it is not clear how much, if any, has been delivered. The amount also falls far short of the $44 billion that the FAO guesses will be needed each year to end malnutrition (and even shorter, aid agencies reflect, of the $14 trillion poured by rich countries into their banks). Still, the amount is not trivial. It would finance for three years the annual $7 billion that the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think tank in Washington, DC, estimates will be the bill for developing countries to protect agriculture from the impact of climate change. And it excludes the far greater sums developing countries themselves are promising to farming.
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Agriculture and food security have become “the core of the international agenda”, as the G8 called it. In 2009, the World Bank increased its spending on agriculture by 50%, to $6 billion. The Islamic Development Bank is creating an agriculture department for the first time.
Barack Obama asked Congress to double to just over $1 billion America’s aid for agricultural development in 2010. And in a sign that food productivity means more than warm words and cash, he nominated a pundit, not a politician, to head USAID, the assistance agency: Rajiv Shah, the chief scientist for the Department of Agriculture. In the West, there is a new consensus on the need to invest more in agriculture in emerging markets.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at America’s Columbia University, has argued that the next step should be to create a new international agency to co-ordinate all the money and perhaps have a big budget of its own. He wants something similar to the global fund to fight HIV/AIDS, a public-private partnership. Earlier food shortages, in the 1970s, had also produced institutional shake-ups: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), influential groups in the field, were both set up then.
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But the latest crisis has not spawned any institutional children, mainly because the UN food agencies—FAO, IFAD and the World Food Programme—spent too much time bickering. Instead, institution-building took the form of tinkering. The idea for what was grandly labelled a global partnership on food security began with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the spring of 2008 and morphed into a UN committee and a “high-level task force” attached to the secretary-general’s office. So far, this modest arrangement seems to be working rather well, at least in terms of mobilising attention and resources.
Tiffany BraceletsWorse, the price respite, while it lasted, did nothing for the poorest and most vulnerable. According to the FAO, the number of malnourished people in the world rose to over 1 billion this year, up from 915m in 2008 (see chart, below). Economists at the World Bank reckon that the number living on less than $1.25 a day will rise by 89m between 2008 and 2010 and those on under $2 a day will rise by 120m. A quarter of a century after a famine in Ethiopia which dramatised failings in the food system, famine is again stalking the Horn of Africa. Has anything been done to prepare for future food shocks?
Certainly, say most governments. Money is starting to pour into agriculture after 30 years of neglect. There has been a spasm of institutional reform. And public and private sectors are doing more to help farmers than ever.
At their meeting in L’Aquila in July, the Group of Eight (G8) large rich economies promised to increase spending on agricultural development by $20 billion over the next three years. Not much of this was new money (probably $3 billion-5 billion) and it is not clear how much, if any, has been delivered. The amount also falls far short of the $44 billion that the FAO guesses will be needed each year to end malnutrition (and even shorter, aid agencies reflect, of the $14 trillion poured by rich countries into their banks). Still, the amount is not trivial. It would finance for three years the annual $7 billion that the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think tank in Washington, DC, estimates will be the bill for developing countries to protect agriculture from the impact of climate change. And it excludes the far greater sums developing countries themselves are promising to farming.
tiffany bracelet
Agriculture and food security have become “the core of the international agenda”, as the G8 called it. In 2009, the World Bank increased its spending on agriculture by 50%, to $6 billion. The Islamic Development Bank is creating an agriculture department for the first time.
Barack Obama asked Congress to double to just over $1 billion America’s aid for agricultural development in 2010. And in a sign that food productivity means more than warm words and cash, he nominated a pundit, not a politician, to head USAID, the assistance agency: Rajiv Shah, the chief scientist for the Department of Agriculture. In the West, there is a new consensus on the need to invest more in agriculture in emerging markets.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at America’s Columbia University, has argued that the next step should be to create a new international agency to co-ordinate all the money and perhaps have a big budget of its own. He wants something similar to the global fund to fight HIV/AIDS, a public-private partnership. Earlier food shortages, in the 1970s, had also produced institutional shake-ups: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), influential groups in the field, were both set up then.
tiffany ring
But the latest crisis has not spawned any institutional children, mainly because the UN food agencies—FAO, IFAD and the World Food Programme—spent too much time bickering. Instead, institution-building took the form of tinkering. The idea for what was grandly labelled a global partnership on food security began with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the spring of 2008 and morphed into a UN committee and a “high-level task force” attached to the secretary-general’s office. So far, this modest arrangement seems to be working rather well, at least in terms of mobilising attention and resources.
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