Tag Archives: Hunger

Latin America to tackle dual problems of hunger and obesity

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Latin American governments have pledged to work toward ending hunger within a decade while tackling an epidemic of rising obesity in the region – itself considered a form of malnutrition.

At a regional meeting of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), government representatives from across Latin American and the Caribbean drew up plans to accelerate cuts in hunger, which has halved in the region in the last 25 years.

At the same time, far more attention needs to be paid to combating obesity, particularly among women, in a region where nearly a quarter of all adults are obese, the FAO said.

“Countries have been very clear: the regional priority is to eradicate hunger by 2025,” Jose Graziano da Silva, head of the FAO said at the meeting in Mexico City which ended on Thursday.

Efforts to combat hunger will focus on Central America’s “dry corridor” running through Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where millions of people have been affected by a prolonged drought exacerbated by climate change.

“Today, climate change has caused those droughts to be more erratic, prolonged and unpredictable,” Graziano da Silva said.

He said Latin America and the Caribbean can be the first region to achieve two of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals – eradicating hunger and poverty – five years before the proposed target dates of 2030.

Since 1991, the number of hungry people in Latin America and the Caribbean has halved to 34 million from 66 million and the region was the only one that met the U.N. Millennium Development Goals on reducing hunger by 2015, the FAO says.

Aid in the form of conditional cash transfers targeting poor families, pioneered by some of the region’s biggest economies, including Brazil, have meant people have had more money to spend on food.

But changing diets have triggered a rising tide of obesity, with nearly a third of women and four million children now obese in the region.

Programmes aimed at making it easier for family farmers to access credit, insurance, seeds and fertilizers, to encourage them to grow traditional food crops are one way of addressing the problem, Graziano da Silva said.

“The rescue of the region’s traditional crops and food products will allow to promote better diets and face the double burden of malnutrition,” he said.

Initiatives that encourage local governments to buy produce directly from farmers to provide healthy food for school meals, already well-established and hailed as a success in Brazil, will be promoted across Latin America, the FAO said.

The agency said more needs to be done to help subsistence farmers adjust to the impact of climate change, which brings increasing extreme and erratic weather from drought to flooding.

Latin America’s agricultural sector lost $11 billion due to natural disasters between 2003 and 2013, the FAO said.

Efforts must also focus on sustainable fishing by states signing an International Agreement on Port State Measures, which seeks to combat illegal fishing. Three more countries need to ratify the agreement for it to come into effect, the FAO said.

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney, editing by Ros Russell)

Food insecurity on the rise in South Sudan, Haiti

More than 6 million people in South Sudan and Haiti are facing food insecurity, United Nations agencies warned this week, including thousands who could soon face catastrophic shortages.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and two other U.N. groups issued the warning for South Sudan on Monday, saying that 4.8 million of the country’s residents are at risk of going hungry. That includes about 40,000 people who the agency warned “are on the brink of catastrophe.”

The WFP issued its own warning for Haiti on Tuesday, saying the El Nino weather pattern fueled a drought that has 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, double the total of six months ago.

In a joint statement, the WFP, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said the South Sudan situation was “particularly worrisome” because the country is about to enter its lean season, when food is the most scarce.

They warn about 1 in 4 people in South Sudan require urgent assistance.

A recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, a barometer for measuring food security, found 23 percent of South Sudan is at risk of “acute food and nutrition insecurity” in the first three months of this year. It said the majority of them live in the states of Unity, Jonglei and Upper Nile, where ongoing violent conflicts have forced many from their homes.

The report indicated there was “overwhelming evidence of a humanitarian emergency” in some areas, noting some people were eating water lilies, and warned the situation would likely worsen as water dried up in the coming weeks. The report could not confirm if parts of the country were already experiencing famine, as fighting prevented researchers from accessing certain areas.

The report said the country is also grappling with the effects of a drop in the value of its currency, which sent prices surging. It said the price of Sorghum, a cereal grain, increased 11-fold in a year.

The agencies said it was important they be given the chance to supply aid to those in need.

“Families have been doing everything they can to survive but they are now running out of options,” Jonathan Veitch, the UNICEF representative in South Sudan, said in a statement. “Many of the areas where the needs are greatest are out of reach because of the security situation. It’s crucial that we are given unrestricted access now. If we can reach them, we can help them.”

The WFP is also looking to help Haiti.

According to the organization, the country has seen three straight years of drought and an abnormally strong El Nino weather pattern is threatening to spoil the country’s next harvest.

El Nino occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual, creating a ripple effect that brings atypical and sometimes extreme weather throughout the world. It’s been blamed for creating heavy flooding in some regions and droughts in others, both of which can spoil harvests.

The WFP said some parts of the country lost 70 percent of last year’s crops, and approximately 1.5 million Haitians are facing severe food insecurity. Others face malnutrition and hunger.

In southern Africa, an illusion built on aid heralds hope and hunger

LILONGWE (Reuters) – As she walks along a dirt road in central Malawi, Louise Abale carries her precious maize wrapped in a brightly coloured cloth and balanced on her head.

Because of drought in Malawi and across southern Africa the grain has doubled in price in the space of a year, and now costs around 200 kwacha ($0.28) a kilo.

Like many, Abale is struggling to pay for maize, a staple of the diet, and says her own – stunted – crop will not be ready for harvest for two months. “It’s too expensive, I have almost no money,” she said.

In all 2.8 million people in Malawi, or 17 percent of the population, now face hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Drought and floods have hit the maize crop, exposing the fragility of gains which had seen Malawi’s rates of malnutrition slashed in the past two decades.

That progress was partly rooted in a fertilizer grant for small-scale farmers. But now the government, starved of donor funds following a graft scandal over two years ago, can ill afford such payments and says it must scale down the program.

Ironically, policies aimed at ensuring basic food security are partly to blame for a cycle of rural poverty and aid dependency in this land-locked African nation, leaving the population vulnerable to climate shocks, economists say.

“There is no doubt that the fertilizer subsidy was only feasible due to donor support,” said Ed Hobey, an analyst at Africa Risk Consulting. “At best, it was unsustainable without continued donor support, at worst, it was an illusion built on aid.”

Launched in 2005, the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) provides qualifying farmers – those with limited income but a plot of productive land – with two coupons which can be redeemed for two 50-kg bags of fertilizer. The recipients make a modest contribution, with the government footing most of the bill.

Because the government is subsidizing the production of maize – the main source of calories for many poor households – it also bans the export of the grain.

The program is credited by the government and some aid agencies with lifting maize production and cutting hunger.

The data appear to back that up.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the percentage of Malawi’s malnourished population fell to 21.8 percent in 2012-14 from 45 percent two decades earlier.

But FISP’s role here is difficult to untangle as most of those gains were made before 2005. Still, there is evidence of benefits, including indirect ones.

Stunting among Malawi children – a key nutrition measure – fell to 42.4 percent in 2014 from 49 percent in 2002.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

But the program has also had unintended consequences.

The focus on food security, including the ban on maize exports, has discouraged investment in more productive commercial farming methods.

“Our concern with the export ban is that it limits the scope to expand production among more medium and large-scale farms if they are unable to market the surplus,” said Richard Record, World Bank Senior Country Economist, World Bank in Malawi.

In the long run such a ban stunts food production, especially in an age of increasingly high-tech farming, economists say.

FISP also diverted state funds from other areas.

In all, FISP has accounted for as much as 9 percent of government expenditure and over half the agricultural budget, leaving scant funds to invest in rural transport links and other projects that would benefit the countryside.

“The FISP was not matched by increased investment in rural infrastructure especially roads and irrigation,” said Hobey of Africa Risk Consulting.

This retards development of other sectors in the farm value chain, such as canning, which can kick-start industrialization, economists and analysts say.

Initially FISP met its objective: providing calories to the rural poor. Between 2007 and 2014 Malawi produced bumper maize crops, with surpluses recorded since 2007 – until last year.

A study in the “The American Journal of Agricultural Economics” found a 15 percent boost in maize production under FISP coincided with a 15 percent decrease in the amount of land devoted to the grain.

This suggests small-scale farmers diversified to cash crops such as tobacco and cotton.

DONOR DROUGHT DRAINS FISP COFFERS

Today FISP is no longer viable, government officials and analysts say.

Donor funds for the budget have dried up in the wake of a scandal over two years ago dubbed “cashgate”, in which state officials siphoned millions of dollars.

“We are going to have to be scaling down expenditure on FISP, we are reacting to diminishing resources of funds for the budget,” Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe told Reuters.

Belt tightening is underway, though the number of FISP recipients has remained unchanged at 1.5 million.

Instead of paying 500 Malawian kwacha ($0.70) toward the two 50 kg bags of fertilizer subsidised, Gondwe said farmers would now pay 3,500 kwacha. The cost of a bag is around 20,000 kwacha.

Several subsistence farmers interviewed by Reuters in their fields said they could not afford the 3,500 kwacha, let alone the full cost.

The price for fertilizer has surged as it is imported and the kwacha has been sliding against the dollar, losing 63 percent in the past 12 months.

Gondwe said the program this financial year would cost 54 billion kwacha instead of an original estimate of 40 billion, plus an additional 8 billion rand for seeds.

INDIVIDUAL SUCCESSES

To be sure, FISP has helped individual farmers, such as Salome Banda. Five years ago, Banda made the transition from subsistence farming to producing a surplus of maize for market because she received the grant once.

“I have not had it since 2010 but I can buy my own fertilizer now,” she told Reuters as she stood proudly by 50 kg bags of her maize stacked in a warehouse north of Lilongwe. She said one FISP grant tripled her production that season.

For others, the benefits have not translated into such gains and even Banda, while she produces surpluses, has hardly made the leap to more productive, technical farming.

“When I got FISP, I fed all my children,” said Matezenji Watsoni, a 35-year-old mother of seven, as she waited outside a World Food Programme relief station in a rural Lilongwe suburb for a 50 kg bag of maize.

“But this is the third year I have not had it, and it has brought hunger to my house,” she said.

This year a perfect storm is brewing after a decade of maize surpluses turned into a deficit of 225,000 tonnes in 2015, in a country that consumes 3 million tonnes annually. The harvest this season looks set to be even worse.

RURAL TILL THE COWS COME HOME

Another unintended outcome of the FISP is that by subsidizing peasant farming, people have an incentive to remain on the land, adding to rural population pressures.

Late rains have clothed central regions in simmering shades of green but this idyllic image belies the late start to the summer planting season and the grinding poverty of rain-fed, hand tilled agriculture.

Malawi, which has done little to industrialize, is also barely urban. In 1990, 88 percent of the population was rural, a number that was 84 percent in 2014, according to World Bank data. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is 63 percent rural.

Asked about industrialization, finance minister Gondwe, a jovial septuagenarian, looked almost bemused.

“It will take time to industrialize. But don’t forget this country cannot even make a needle. So to base your policy on that probably is asking too much.”

(Additional reporting by Eldson Chagara; Editing by James Macharia and Janet McBride)