The food crisis

The emerging global food crisis is making headlines everywhere and in my search for the reasons that are triggering this worldwide situation I came across an article of Emily Buchanan of the BBC. This is what she wrote and I quote:
“A silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world”.
That is how the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) summed up the global food shortages.
It is certainly a storm that has hit with little warning and has plunged an extra 100 million people into poverty.
The crisis has triggered riots in Haiti, Cameroon, Indonesia and Egypt and is deemed a dangerous threat to stability.
It is not so much famine that is the worry, it is widespread misery and malnutrition.
The WFP’s biggest concern is for the people living on 50 cents a day who have nothing to fall back on.
Amongst these are the 70 million people the organisation helps with food aid.
The costs of that aid have risen so sharply the WFP is now facing a $750m (£377m) shortfall in its budget.
It means some of their programmes may have to be cut and rations reduced.
So why have food prices soared?
The rises are due to a lethal combination of high fuel costs, bad weather in key food producing countries, the increase in land allocated to bio-fuels, and a surge in demand - much of it from the rising middle classes of China and India.
The problem is that once the price of rice or wheat has risen, other factors kick in which make things worse.
There is panic and people start hoarding, speculators buy up supply, and food producing countries impose export controls to try and preserve food for their own people.
This then means less is available to be exported to countries which rely on food imports.
What can be done to solve the crisis?
On an optimistic note, WFP head Josette Sheeran said she was confident the world could produce the food it needed, it was just a question of riding this difficult period and getting enough resources to invest.
But it is not going to be a quick fix.
She used the example of Kenya’s Rift Valley where farmers even now are planting a third less of the land than last year.
This is because fertiliser has more than doubled in price.
“Soaring food prices should be a wake-up call for the world to make long term investment in the food supply chain,” she said. Small farmers are unable to deliver more food without that investment.
It is their plight, struggling with poor land, inadequate tools and lack of transport, that has made it so difficult for them to come out of poverty.
Amy Barry from Oxfam feels agriculture has been badly neglected.
“Agriculture stopped being sexy, it was all about unglamorous logistics,” she said.
“The focus was more on delivering health and education services. That has to change.” End of quote.
So what does all this mean for the Ethiopian people, many of whom are already consistently depending on food aid? I saw recent pictures the other day of women digging for roots as there was nothing else to eat for them. Apart from the global food crisis there is a national food crisis that requires all attention and resources from the authorities and donor community to purchase the badly needed supplies to address the current situation.
But what can be done in the long run to reduce the effects of the global trend we are witnessing today? With all the resources that are at our disposal in Ethiopia, we need to find ways to become more self-sufficient in food production or otherwise become even more dependent on external resources that are becoming increasingly scarce. We need to rethink the agricultural techniques that are being used and find ways to step up production per acre using more drought resistant seeds and effective irrigation methods, resulting in intensive farming technologies. Much can be learnt from research institutes and from what is being done in other countries and in other agricultural sectors, like for example the booming flower industry. It is indeed time for an agricultural revolution in Ethiopia and all efforts should be made to try and turn the looming food crisis around and become self sufficient instead.