New on Gulf's shopping list: Foreigners' farmland (IHT)

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New on Gulf's shopping list: Foreigners' farmland
The Associated Press
Monday, November 17, 2008
NAHEL, United Arab Emirates: In the dunes around this sun-scorched desert village, where camels still plod along dusty roads an hour south of Dubai's skyscrapers, farmers are making the wasteland bloom.
Row upon row of bell peppers grow plump in a temperature-controlled greenhouse. Lilies and roses bud nearby, and strawberries are on their way, all thanks to sophisticated water-saving irrigation.
Yet even high-tech establishments like the Mirak Agricultural Services farms here and elsewhere in this riverless country will never feed the region's rapidly growing population. It is that realization that is persuading wealthy Gulf Arabs to look far beyond their shores for more fertile acreage - tens of thousands of hectares, in some cases.
There are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough water. Lush urban landscaping and ambitious agricultural projects here and in Saudi Arabia, which once spent so much on farm subsidies that it exported surplus wheat, are quickly draining aquifers, including some that are millennia old and cannot be refilled.
That stark reality, and rising food prices, is sending the region's leaders scrambling to lock up even more long-term food supplies abroad. And where once the region was content to spend its petrodollars on food sold on the open market, Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.
The prime ministers of Qatar and Kuwait traveled separately to Cambodia this year to discuss securing paddy land for rice-growing. Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, visited Kazakhstan in central Asia, where agricultural investments were on the agenda.
Dubai World, a sprawling conglomerate controlled by that emirate's government, last month said it was creating a new subsidiary targeting global investments in a wide range of commodities, including food.
Plans are also accelerating in the private sector.
The Saudi Binladin Group, for example, is considering investing more than $4 billion to grow food in Indonesia, said Salim Segaf al-Jufri, the Indonesian ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Under the proposed project, the company would produce basmati rice in Sulawesi, Papua and western Java.
Most such talks are continuing in private. Of those companies that could be reached for comment, none made officials available to discuss their investments in detail. That may be because many of the deals are being hatched in volatile countries, such as Pakistan and Sudan, that have serious domestic food concerns of their own. The idea of shipping off homegrown crops to feed rich foreigners could stir dissent.
"These are countries that come with a lot of political baggage," said Eckart Woertz, program manager for economics at the Gulf Research Center, which estimates the Gulf's conventional water resources will be gone within three decades. "People riot when they don't get food."
Experts say the agriculture investments could be a win-win situation. The Gulf gains food security, while poorer developing countries benefit from added jobs and improved technology.
But there are concerns, too.
The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, has warned that foreign land acquisition and long-term leasing schemes, if done poorly, risk "creating a neocolonial pact" and "unacceptable work conditions for agricultural workers."
Even so, some countries are seeking out investment.
Pakistan, already a key source of labor for the Gulf, has been among the most active. This spring, Islamabad helped organize a show in Dubai aimed at increasing investment in the country's agricultural and dairy industries.
Huma Fakhar, managing partner at MAP Services Group, a market research and trade consultant which sponsored the event, said Pakistan was a logical choice for Gulf investment.
Fakhar said an investor from Abu Dhabi, whom she declined to name, last year bought about 16,000 hectares, or 40,000 acres, of farmland in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Two UAE firms, Emirates Investments Group and Abraaj Capital, have also expressed interest in investing directly in Pakistani agriculture, she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/asia/gulf.php



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With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar (IHT)

A worker returning from the fields in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Many people here are stateless, unrecognized by the government because they are Muslim. (International Herald Tribune)

With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar
By The International Herald Tribune
Monday, October 20, 2008
SITTWE, Myanmar: In some spots, the road that leads to Kobi Ramau's village looks as if it has more potholes than pavement.
Not that it matters too much to Ramau, a farmer and father of four: He does not have a car, let alone a bicycle. And Myanmar's military government bans him from traveling outside his district without a permit.
Like the more than 720,000 Muslims who live in Rakhine State, this rain-soaked western corner of Myanmar, Ramau is stateless. His parents and grandparents were born here in British colonial times, but the military government does not recognize him as a citizen.
Ramau's life is an extreme example of the deprivation, hunger and general poverty that many people in this country face. Soldiers expropriated Ramau's land a decade ago and took his 80 buffalo. He is now paid the equivalent of $25 a month by the military to till the land he once owned. "They took everything," he said.
But a few hundred miles southeast, in another low-lying, rice-growing area of Myanmar that was no better off - until recently - a very different picture has emerged.
The cyclone that ravaged Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta five months ago has unexpectedly opened the door to foreign money and foreign aid workers who are leading projects to "rebuild better" the roads, schools, houses and water storage tanks that were destroyed or damaged during the storm.
After initial resistance by Myanmar's junta, dollars are cascading into the Delta on a scale that this country has perhaps never seen.
Britain, the European Union, the United States and Australia - all of which have long been considered the sworn enemies of the ruling junta - have led donors in a fund-raising effort that has so far provided $240 million, or about $100 for every person who survived Cyclone Nargis, an amount that the United Nations hopes to double in the coming months.
Aid workers say that this intensive rebuilding effort in the Delta, where only a small fraction of the country's population lives, has opened up the possibility to expanded humanitarian operations in the country.
But, in the here and now, the assistance to the Delta has created a stark imbalance in the country.
"There's a serious amount of money flowing into this country and it's all for Nargis victims," said Frank Smithuis, head of the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières in Myanmar, which tends to the sick both inside and out of the Delta. "That is great, but it is strange that nobody seems interested in the needs of the rest of the country."
The list of those in need of food and medical attention in Myanmar is long and distressing.
Here in this city overlooking the Bay of Bengal, a half-dozen men have as their only employment an umbrella repair business, fixing battered "made-in-China" models that would be tossed into the trash in neighboring countries.
A household survey carried out in June for UN agencies found a "worsening and alarming economic situation" in villages near the border with Bangladesh. With bad weather last year leading to crop failures, families cut back from three to two meals a day. Only 60 percent of boys and less than half of girls had "normal" body mass - the rest were severely malnourished. And only 12 percent of households had soap.
In northern Myanmar, erstwhile opium farmers who gave up the heroin business in recent years in exchange for promises that they would be given food aid have now returned to planting opium because they are hungry, aid officials say.
Across the country, out of a quarter of a million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, 80,000 are in urgent need of retroviral drugs and only 15,000 will receive them, according to Smithuis. "The others will die," he said.
In Chin State, near the border with India, villagers are suffering what has the ring of a biblical plague. Thousands of rats, attracted to a rare blooming of bamboo flowers, have eaten through rice fields and other crops. Farmers in some villages are now living off of wild tubers in the jungle.
"The rats ate everything," said Pyi Kyaw, a 38-year-old villager who rowed a boat loaded with bamboo and other timber for several days downstream to exchange the wood for large bags of rice. It will take nine days to row back home against the currents, he said.
For years, Western countries were reluctant to provide aid to Myanmar for fear that it would strengthen the grip of the junta and its repressive policies. But the shocking toll of the cyclone, which struck on May 2 and 3 and left an estimated 130,000 people dead or missing, was a watershed moment because Western governments believed that the plight of the victims overrode concerns about ways that the junta might benefit. Today, 26 international aid organizations are operating in one district of the Delta alone.
In past years Myanmar has received tiny levels of aid compared with its neighbors. In 2005, the latest year for which comparable data are available, Myanmar received $3 per person in aid compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos and $22 in Vietnam.
The quandary for aid organizations is that assistance pledged for the Delta must be spent in the Delta, aid workers say. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency that delivers rice, beans, cooking oil and iodized salt, is fully funded through January for victims of the cyclone. But the organization will have to cut back programs in northern areas of the country because of an immediate shortfall of $11.2 million, partly caused by the increase in global food prices.
"We haven't been able to convince donors to give us money for projects in the northern areas," said Chris Kaye, the head of the Myanmar operations of the World Food Program.
The cyclone has also drained resources away from areas outside the Delta. Trucks, aid personnel and equipment were channeled to the cyclone-hit regions from northern areas of the country. And with a key rice-growing area in the Delta damaged by the storm the government forbade the World Food Program from buying cheaper locally produced rice, fearing food shortages. The United Nations is now forced to buy more expensive foreign rice, further straining budgets.
In perhaps the most stark example of the imbalance between the Delta and the rest of the country, impoverished villagers here along the border with Bangladesh have been forced by the government to donate money for the victims of Cyclone Nargis - a philanthropic gesture, couched as patriotic duty, they can hardly afford.
Ramau, the farmer, seems initially startled when asked what types of things he needs.
"We need so many things," he said, pausing to respond. "We have no money."

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Food crisis in retreat, but 'major emergency' still exists (IHT)

By Laura MacInnisReuters
Sunday, October 19, 2008
GENEVA: At first sight, it seems like good news for those fighting hunger around the world: the spikes in commodity prices that set off food riots this year have been all but erased amid the recent financial turmoil.
But relief officials now have another fear: that distracted donors will forget that the problem goes much deeper, and stop devoting time and money to a food emergency that will only be worsened by a now-looming recession.
"There is no automatic correlation between what happens in the wheat futures market in Chicago and the price of wheat flour in Afghanistan," said John Holmes, the top UN humanitarian aid official, who also coordinates a task force on the food crisis.
International food prices hit nine-month lows in September and have since tumbled farther as investors pulled their money from turbulent markets. In the past three weeks alone, corn futures have fallen 32 percent and soybean futures 28 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.
"What we fear is that people will look at those prices and think that the crisis is over," Holmes said. "We still regard it as a very urgent crisis and a major emergency."
Many food commodities are now trading at around half their peaks in June, when the United Nations called an emergency meeting in Rome to tackle a crisis that had sparked protests, strikes and riots in countries including Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, Haiti, Peru, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan.
At that time, the UN World Food Program called costlier food a "silent tsunami" threatening millions with starvation.
Now, the program says lower prices mean it can afford better nourishment for the 90 million people it helps feed around the world. "We may be able to buy slightly more food for our beneficiaries," Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.
The aid group Oxfam estimates that 967 million people worldwide now suffer from hunger - 119 million more than before high energy prices, biofuels, greater emerging market demands and speculation started to push up staple food costs.
Siwa Msangi, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, said those stresses had not disappeared. "There has probably been less financial market activity involving commodities, due to the overall economic situation, and some consumer demand may have dropped off. But the longer-term drivers of upward price pressure are still there," Msangi said.
Donor governments at the UN's Rome summit meeting pledged $12.3 billion to help bolster agricultural productivity and encourage farmers to plant more, especially in poor countries where huge numbers of agrarian workers are moving to cities.
But only $1 billion of that has been paid out so far, as bank failures and market stresses have distracted governments.
Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said he feared that the financial crisis might cause international commitments to invest in seeds, fertilizers and other yield-bolstering technologies to "evaporate."
"The great uncertainty now enveloping international markets and the threat of global recession may tempt countries towards protectionism and towards reassessing their commitments to international development aid," he said.
Holmes said the UN food crisis task force would meet again in the coming weeks.
Rice, a staple in much of Asia, remains relatively expensive, with prices still up 15 percent this year. "The prices are shooting down because the demand is pulling back," Pavel Vavra, a trade and agriculture expert at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said. "Whether it is going to last is difficult to predict."

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Tajik farmers enslaved where cotton is king (IHT)

Women in a cotton field in the Kabodiyon district of Tajikistan, on a former collective farm. (Carolyn Drake for The New York Times )

By David L. Stern
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
SHAARTUZ DISTRICT, Tajikistan: Farhod, a farmer in this dusty southwestern spit of land pushed up against the Afghan and Uzbek borders, said that he had committed a subversive and potentially punishable act this growing season. He planted watermelons in addition to the usual cotton.
Such is the precarious position of growers throughout this impoverished republic of seven million that Farhod refused to be photographed or to give his real name. He fears the authorities will destroy his crop, even though they had assured him that he could plant whatever he wanted this year.
"They press down on us from all sides," said Farhod, a father of eight, as he looked out on his neatly planted rows of millionaire, shakira and maistros watermelons. Cotton is king in Tajikistan, at least as far as the government is concerned. In fact, say agricultural experts, the regal metaphor is apt: the system is close to feudal.
Farmers are shackled to the land - "like slaves," one European official says - and forced to grow cotton through a complex system of debts and obligations.
The fact that cotton is often grown to the exclusion of other crops could have catastrophic implications this winter. After a dry summer, Tajikistan and possibly other Central Asian countries are facing severe food shortages, and international aid organizations are girding for a possible crisis.
Cotton is at the core of Tajikistan's economy and, reportedly, corruption. Companies associated with President Emomali Rahmon's inner circle monopolize the business, diplomats and industry experts say, paying taxes that account for 25 percent of the country's annual budget.
The cozy arrangement contributes to what the International Crisis Group, a private research organization, called in a 2005 report "political repression, economic stagnation, widespread poverty and environmental degradation."
Cotton growing, the group said, is "simple and exploitative."
For instance, Tajikistan's and Uzbekistan's governments have traditionally mobilized tens of thousands of university students and children as young as 10 to pick the harvest by hand, since many men from the work force emigrate to other countries for seasonal work.
For Farhod, as for other Tajik farmers, the problems began from his first days as an independent farmer three years ago, when the local collective farm, which dated from the Soviet era, was broken up. He was allotted, but does not own, 16 hectares, or 40 acres, of land and a $5,000 debt carried over automatically from the farm's arrears.
Each year most of his profits go to working off the debt, which was assumed by a cotton trading company. The company maintains a monopoly over all cotton trade in the Shaartuz region and sells Farhod his supplies on credit - at inflated prices, he said - and then buys his production at below-market prices.
Under this system the farmers are perpetually strapped, as they never see any cash. Farhod and others say that what little they earn goes for food and other essentials, but since they have no money in hand, they are forced to buy from the trading company at inflated prices.
"They pay us, but only 14 months later when they sell the cotton," Farhod said. "Each year the debts get bigger and bigger."
The government works in tandem with the trading companies, say Western experts, who spoke off the record because they need to work with Tajik officials. Until recently, officials enforced an unwritten law requiring farmers to devote 80 percent to 90 percent of their arable land to cotton production. When farmers have tried to grow something else, officials and the companies have claimed breach of contract and plowed the field under, farmers say.
Cotton's significance was underlined early this year when the International Monetary Fund revealed that the Tajik government had secretly diverted its hard currency reserves to use as collateral for $240 million in foreign loans for the cotton trading companies.
The scandal broke just as the country was paralyzed last winter by a heat and electricity crisis, which laid bare what many Western experts saw as the Tajik government's ineptitude and inadequacy.
Following a crippling civil war in the 1990s, international donors funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the country, but now are beginning to question this policy.
Carlos Pinerua, an IMF official formerly responsible for Tajikistan, said in a telephone interview that the bar was set high for the Tajiks to regain the trust of the international multilaterals, which are multinational organizations that finance development.
Noting that the Tajiks had lied to the IMF over a 10-year period, he said, "We will have to look at how to help the country - they are an IMF member - but financing will be very hard."
With Tajikistan's currency reserves now close to zero, the country is highly vulnerable to economic shocks, like the current credit crisis, Western diplomats say. Also complicating the picture is Tajikistan's endemic governmental dysfunction and corruption.
A case in point is the fate of one of the government officials at the heart of the loan scandal, the governor of the central bank, Murodali Alimardon. Far from being fired, Alimardon was promoted to deputy prime minister, and put in charge of agricultural reforms.
This year the Tajik government issued a decree guaranteeing farmers the right to cultivate their land as they see best. Farhod says that he has been planting about 12 hectares of the 16 hectares in cotton and the rest in other crops.
Other farmers say that the cotton quota remains in effect, though slightly lower at 70 percent.
But few here place much trust in a decree. "So far, they're not against the melons, but we'll see," Farhod said.








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Water Crisis: Another inconvenient truth (IHT)

OPINION

By Peter Brabeck-Letmathe
Sunday, October 5, 2008

At last, many of the world's political leaders have begun to realize that diverting land and food crops to produce biofuels leads to higher food prices. But an equally important consequence of this policy folly is being largely ignored in the public and political debate: Producing biofuels will further deplete the world's already overtaxed water supply.
This is emblematic of a larger and increasingly dangerous disregard for the world's most valuable, irreplaceable and finite natural resource: fresh water.
Seventy percent of all water withdrawal is already used in agriculture, and while all such activity requires water, growing enough soy or corn to create biofuels is especially water-intensive. For example, to produce just one gallon of diesel fuel up to 9,000 gallons of water are required. Up to 4,000 gallons are needed to produce enough corn for the same amount of ethanol. By way of contrast, producing enough food to meet the caloric needs of one person for one day in, for example, Tunisia or Egypt requires about 666 gallons of water, and twice as much in California (caloric needs and intakes vary widely from region to region due to dietary customs).
If all of the biofuel targets and timelines set by governments across the world are met, we can expect water withdrawals for agriculture to increase by up to one-third. Making a dent in the world's energy problems with biofuels will require much more water than the world can afford to give up. There simply isn't enough; water tables are falling throughout the world. While there are substitutes for oil, there are none for water.
The world is facing a water crisis and, consequently, a food crisis that in terms of severity and potential impact far supersedes the current food crisis or the exhaustion of fossil fuels. Either it never occurred to biofuel advocates to ask about the amount of water needed for biofuel production, or they simply chose to ignore this particular inconvenient truth.
According to a report by the International Water Management Institute, by 2025, about one third of the world's population, perhaps as many as 3 billion people, will face water shortages. From an agricultural standpoint, we may be looking at losses equivalent to the entire grain crops of India and the United States by then. According to some estimates, even without biofuels, we will very likely reach the upper limit of available fresh water for worldwide consumption, more than 2.9 billion cubic miles, by 2050. A growing reliance on biofuels would exacerbate an already difficult challenge.
There was a remarkable lack of careful planning in the drive to convert food to fuel. In Europe and the United States, a developer trying to open a shopping center is subjected to an extensive environmental impact assessment. But when politicians decided to promote biofuels, the decisions were not preceded with a comparably thorough analysis of environmental sustainability.
Regardless of how it happened, policy makers neglected the dwindling supply of a resource essential to life in order to replace fossil fuels and fight global warming. This was not a sensible trade-off. There is no question that we have to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. But biofuels derived from food crops planted exclusively for that use are clearly the wrong solution. While there are substitutes for oil, there aren't any for water.
This scandal is instructive because it was caused, in part, by the general attitude toward water in both the developed and developing world. Water is still treated as a limitless resource in too many communities, and one reason is that it is has no price. States heavily subsidize water usage so that it is sometimes even free for both farmers and consumers. Because it is not assigned a value in the marketplace, there is no incentive for using it efficiently. If water were not free or heavily subsidized, would biofuels still be produced? I doubt it!
The water problem can be solved. It requires much more careful stewardship of water supplies by local and national governments. I, for one, also believe reasonable pricing policies would help by encouraging the use and development of water efficient crops and smart irrigation systems. But even those who disagree with that prescription should be deeply disturbed by the lack of attention paid to water by those who rushed headlong to biofuels as the answer to the world's energy problems. As the international community grapples with how to fight global warming and build a sustainable future, it must stop ignoring a priority that is even more pressing.
Failure to address the water problem will result in food scarcity. Water scarcity is no longer an environmental issue. It is a national and international security issue that can not be ignored.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is the chairman and former chief executive of Nestlé.

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Thieves steal donated food in Haiti (IHT)

Food donated for Haitian storm victims was stolen and put up for sale, according to authorities who seized three storehouses full of illegally diverted food aid Tuesday.
In the western city of Carrefour, Mayor Yvon Jerome said authorities acted after residents complained about the sale of donated rice.
"A lot of people were buying the rice because it was much cheaper compared to prices on the regular market," Jerome told Reuters. "You can read on the bag 'Donated by Taiwan' and on some other bags we read 'U.S. Rice.'"
The storehouses full of stolen food were placed under seal and the food will be redistributed to the needy, said Jerome, who called the diversion of desperately needed aid an outrage against humanity.
"There are so many people starving and desperate for that food," said Jerome. "And to see people that are better off trying to steal it goes against all sense of humanity and charity."
Haiti was hit by four tropical storms and hurricanes -- Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike -- in about a month. The storms triggered flooding and mudslides that killed at least 800 people, including 534 in the hardest-hit northern town of Gonaives, which was almost entirely submerged.
The Haitian government, donor countries and humanitarian groups are struggling to feed hundreds of thousands of flood victims in dire need of help.
Judicial authorities were looking for several suspects in connection with the depots in Carrefour, which neighbours the capital of Port-au-Prince, but it was unclear how widespread such thefts were.
The World Food Program said the misery index is rising daily in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, and the situation will require a massive effort to help people stave off hunger and save lives.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/01/america/OUKWD-UK-HAITI-FOOD.php






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Number of people needing [food] aid in Africa doubles (IHT)

Reuters
Thursday, September 18, 2008
LONDON: The number of people living "on the edge of emergency" in Africa has nearly doubled to 220 million in just two years, a leading charity said on Thursday.
CARE International said emergency aid to the impoverished and strife-ridden continent continued to arrive too late, was short-term and policies were targeted too heavily on saving lives rather than building resilience in the population.
"The world's inaction on food emergencies has proved costly and it is the world's poorest people -- stripped of enough to eat -- who are paying the price," said Geoffrey Dennis, the charity's chief executive.
"Governments, the U.N., donors and aid agencies must take this opportunity to deliver the long-term structural reforms to the aid system that will protect the most vulnerable from emergency and build their resilience to food price rises, drought and other shocks."
CARE's report "Living on the Edge of Emergency -- Paying the Price of Inaction" is timed to coincide with a summit in New York next week dedicated to the fight against poverty -- one of the key Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for 2015.
It called for donors to fulfil existing aid commitments and then add some, focus on disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, food production and support for the poorest and make emergency aid and long-term development better coordinated.
It also highlighted the more recently emerged threats to security and welfare that have added to older woes.
Prices of staple foods have surged by an average of 83 percent in the past three years, climate change has already hit some of the poorest -- and therefore less resilient -- countries, biofuels have replaced food crops and increasing urbanization has compounded the problems.
"It is a disgrace that, despite warnings, money is still being spent in the wrong ways," said Dennis.
"Leaders at the MDG meeting must ensure that the aid system can rise to the challenge of the global food crisis or they will measure the cost in billions of wasted emergency funds and the suffering of millions of people pushed to and beyond the edge of yet more needless emergencies."
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell)
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/18/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFRICA-AID.php





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Food prices help tip 75 million into hunger in 2007 (IJT)

Reuters
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
ROME: Rising food prices are partly to blame for adding 75 million more people to the ranks of the world's hungry in 2007 and lifting the global figure to roughly 925 million, the U.N.'s food agency said on Wednesday.
Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), presented the figure to Italy's parliament ahead of the release of an official report on Thursday.
The latest data further distances the international community from reaching U.N. Millennium Development Goals that include halving hunger and poverty by 2015.
Diouf estimated that 850 million people were hungry before the 2007-2008 spike in food prices, which sparked widespread protests and even riots in the most affected nations.
The FAO hosted a food crisis summit in Rome in June to discuss ways to combat high food prices, blamed on poor harvests, high oil costs, biofuels and rising demand for basic staple crops, especially from fast-growing Asian countries.
Next week, world leaders gathering at the United Nations are due to review an updated assessment of progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals -- eight social and economic development benchmarks.
Beyond hunger and poverty, they include increasing universal education and fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Slow delivery of financial aid by some of the world's richest nations is one of the reasons the goals are in danger of being missed by the 2015 deadline, U.N. officials and aid agencies say.
Donor countries have increased assistance since 2000, but in 2006 and 2007 aid levels declined by 4.7 and 8.4 percent respectively, according to a U.N. report published earlier this month that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a "wake-up call."
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-UN-HUNGER.php

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Pakistan considers [farm] asset sales to bolster economy (IHT)

NEW DELHI: Pakistan plans to sell valuable energy assets, beginning with a major gas field, as it tries to reap billions of dollars from deals with investors in industries like banking and farming. The list of state assets for sale may not necessarily be followed by deals, analysts warned.

"Talk of investing huge sums of money doesn't always materialize, because people are put off by the political machinations" in Pakistan, Price said.

Pakistan's "economic curse" is that the ruling elite — civil servants, politicians and the military — have worked in their own interest, not that of the wider population, limiting how much capital the country can raise, he said.

One possible source of new investment is the Middle East.

"There is a cultural and long-term affinity between the two regions," said Youssef Nasr, the chief executive of HSBC in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, in particular, have been strong supporters of Pakistan.

Investors from the Middle East have already bought stakes in telecommunications, banking and industrial companies in Pakistan and have been pleased with the results, he said.

One area of cooperation between Pakistan and the Middle East may be agriculture. The arid climate of the Middle East, coupled with rising food prices, has ignited fears about food security. Pakistan, meanwhile, has swaths of arable land that is lying fallow. Government officials on both sides are exploring links that could lead to joint farming ventures, Nasr said.

"It's not going to be a huge industry, by international standards," he predicted, but it could be large enough to make a difference to Pakistan's economy.



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Big risks for rising number of child brides (IHT)

LONDON: The number of girls in poor countries who marry before the age of 18 will double to 100 million in the next decade, putting many at risk from AIDS, a report said on Thursday.
A global food crisis is making matters worse by pushing more families in the developing world to send young daughters into marriage to deal with poverty, the survey from humanitarian group World Vision found.
Child brides suffer because they often end their education early and are more likely to be injured or to die during childbirth because their bodies are not fully developed.
"Complications during childbearing and delivery are most common in this age set, significantly raising the risk of death, premature delivery, infant mortality and low birthweight," the report said.
An estimated 3,500 girls marry each day before their 15th birthday and another 21,000 do so before they are 18 -- figures the humanitarian group said would balloon in coming years.
While the practice occurs worldwide and in wealthy nations too, it is most common in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Central America, the report said.
The highest child marriage rates were in Bangladesh where nearly 53 percent of girls married before the age of 15, followed by Niger at almost 38 percent, Chad at about 35 percent, and Ethiopia and India at about 31 percent.
"It is most prevalent in communities and households where the starkest poverty mixes with cultural traditions and lack of education to limit a girl's perceived value and potential," it said.

http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/04/asia/OUKWD-UK-CHILDREN-MARRIAGE.php






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A land rush in rural Russia (IHT)

PODLESNY, Russia: The fields around this little farming enclave are among the most fertile on earth. But like tens of million of acres of land in this country, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they literally went to seed.
Now that may be changing. A decade after capitalism transformed Russian industry, an agricultural revolution is stirring in the countryside, shaking up village life and sweeping aside the collective farms that resisted earlier reform efforts and remain the dominant form of agriculture.
The transformation is being driven by soaring global food prices (the price of wheat alone rose 77 percent last year) and a new change allowing foreigners to own agricultural land. Together, they have created a land rush in rural Russia.
"Where else do you have such an abundance of land?" Samir Suleymanov, the World Bank's director for Russia, asked during an interview.
As a result, the business of buying and overhauling collective farms is suddenly and improbably very profitable, attracting hedge fund managers, Russian oligarchs, Swedish portfolio investors and even a descendant of White Russian émigré nobility.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/31/business/food.php







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Haiti hit with new protests over food costs (IHT)

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Demonstrators erected burning barricades in the streets of Haiti's southern city of Les Cayes on Monday to protest rising food prices in the impoverished Caribbean country.
Several hundred demonstrators joined the short-lived protest in the Les Cayes slum of La Savane, before they were dispersed by U.N. peacekeepers and Haiti police firing tear gas.
But the unrest was a reminder of the food riots in Les Cayes in April, when five people were killed in running street battles with police and U.N. troops over the high cost of living.
Those same clashes ignited demonstrations in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere across the country that prompted the Senate to fire Prime Minister Edouard Alexis on April 12.
Alexis' lame-duck cabinet has continued to deal with current affairs while a new government is being formed but political infighting in parliament has dragged out the transition process.
"It's been over four months since the country is being led by a resigning government which lacks legitimacy to address the problems," Marc Antoine, a Les Cayes demonstrator, told Reuters on Monday.
"We launched a series of protests in April, because the price of rice and other food products were too high but prices have doubled since then," Antoine said. "And president (Rene) Preval and politicians in parliament are not doing anything to address the problems," he said.
"Political parties and lawmakers are fighting over who should control the next cabinet. But they don't seem to care for the population that is starving," added Malerbe Jean-Claude, another demonstrator.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/25/america/OUKWD-UK-HAITI-UNREST.php








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World food crisis drives up U.N. aid funding need

UNITED NATIONS: The global food crisis is largely responsible for driving up the United Nations' need for funding to confront disasters and emergencies around the world this year by one-fifth, the U.N. said on Wednesday.
World prices of basic foodstuffs such as wheat and rice have doubled over the last year, badly hitting poor nations that rely on food imports and sparking food riots in Africa and elsewhere.
A mid-year review meeting to assess U.N. aid funding needs for 2008 heard that the original appeal for $3.8 billion (1.9 billion pounds) announced in December and quickly revised to $5.4 billion to accommodate extra crises now stood at $6.5 billion.
The cash is needed to meet appeals for food, shelter, clean water and other necessities in 10 countries, mainly in Africa, plus the west African region.
"One of the main reasons for the rises is because of the global food crisis," U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told a news conference, although he said natural disasters and conflicts were also to blame.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/07/17/america/OUKWD-UK-UN-AID.php



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The world's most expensive food

By Joshua Zumbrun Forbes.com
Published: July 17, 2008

In the chair's summary of the last G-8 conference in Heiligendamm, Germany, there was no mention of food prices or agriculture.
In Pictures: The world's most expensive food
What a difference a year makes.
Since the G-8 last assembled in June 2007, food prices have reached unprecedented heights, threatening to push millions into poverty.
Earlier this month, the general director of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf, said the rising prices of basic foodstuffs have added 50 million additional people to the ranks of the hungry. And World Bank President Robert Zoellick has estimated that the surging prices could push 100 million more people deeper into poverty.
Aid organizations are strapped for cash. Soaring prices forced the U.N's World Food Program, based in Rome, to embark on a massive fund-raising campaign to combat what executive director Josette Sheeran called a "silent tsunami" - a global crisis that, in some fashion, will strike every nation.
Overall, countries like Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Haiti, which import most of their food, stand to hurt the most. And in the poorest countries, the rising prices are causing hardship for farmers, whose production volumes are simply too small to reap a windfall.
One long-term solution is improving agriculture in the developing world so that more countries can one day feed themselves. In fact, 2008 has been dubbed the International Year of the Potato as part of an effort to boost production of the tuber globally. Potatoes are high energy and easy to grow, and experts consider them a good crop for food security because they are not widely traded. But potatoes can only do so much so fast; for many countries, harvests that fill the national stomach are still years away. Nobody expected food prices to rise so high so quickly.
"It caught the world by surprise, to be honest," says Nancy Roman, the director of communications and public policy for the World Food Program. "We were early in identifying rising food prices as a problem, and that was last summer, before this was on the front pages everywhere. But we didn't anticipate just how far this would go."
By all accounts, it's gone too far. The World Bank estimates that 41 countries have suffered losses of between 3% and 10% of their gross domestic product because they've been hammered by soaring prices of food and fuel. More than 30 countries have experienced rioting over food shortages, according to the World Bank.
The humanitarian need to ease the crisis is obvious; people shouldn't be starving. Perhaps less obvious is the global economic threat: Stagnant or collapsing growth in the developing world combined with political instability has the potential to drag down growth everywhere.
People living on a dollar a day are likely spending almost their entire income on food. If the prices double, the amount of food they can afford is halved.
To measure the world's most expensive food, we looked at data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Rather than look at the most expensive food in absolute terms - of course, Beluga caviar and hippopotamus steaks are more expensive than rice - we looked at everyday commodities whose prices have soared the most in the last year. The average family's grocery bill is expanding because of these goods, like rice and butter.
Using information from the commodity prices database maintained by the Commodities and Trade Division of the FAO, we averaged the price of various commodities from January 2008 to April 2008 (the most recent month for which data were available on a wide range of food items) and compared these figures with prices during the same period one year ago.
Some commodities have peaked, and their prices seem to be easing. The costs of rice and wheat, which had nearly doubled, have slacked some. But they are still dramatically higher than a year ago. Some crops, like corn and the grain sorghum, continue to climb.
Prices for food can be highly inter-related. Increased demand for corn, largely driven by production of ethanol as an alternative fuel to gasoline, has caused American farmers to plant less soybeans in favor of corn fields. But fewer soybean fields mean less soy oil, driving up not only the price of soybeans but also other oilseeds.
Using this data, we found that sunflower seeds and its products have experienced the most dramatic increase in prices--up nearly 150% from last year.In Pictures: The world's most expensive food
Behind the price increases, one sees a perfect storm of factors fueling the "silent tsunami": unexpected bad weather, from floods to droughts, pillaged fields across the world; soaring oil prices lifted costs of producing and transporting the crops; prices rose along with demand from both an ever-growing global population and a rapidly expanding American ethanol industry; and as global prices soared, a number of countries implemented beggar-thy-neighbor export curbs, driving up prices even further.
Global leaders cannot do much about the weather. But the remaining factors in the food crisis are manmade. Heads of state have the ability, and the forum, to address the problems. The question is - do they have the will?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/17/business/17Forbes-expensivefoods.php



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Mariann Fischer Boel Speech: Who will feed the World?

Mariann Fischer Boel: Who will feed the World?
Member of the European Commission responsible for Agriculture and Rural Development
Who will feed the World?
The answers from the EUConference: "Who will feed the World?"Brussels, 3 July 2008
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/08/371&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en




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Hunger brings anguish for millions of Pakistanis

THARPARKAR, Pakistan: When Pakistani labourer Mangal Ram's children cry from hunger all he has to offer them is empty promises.
"My kids complain and cry for more food but what can I do?," said Ram, 50, a father of seven who lives in the desert village of Tharparkar, in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh.
"We say 'wait, we'll cook more', what else can we do?" he asks with a shrug.
Ram's anguish is becoming increasingly common in Pakistan where inflation is running at about 20 percent, led by fuel and food prices.
Soaring food prices and shortages of staples mean about 77 million people of Pakistan's 160 million population are food insecure, a 28 percent increase over the past year, according to U.N. World Food Program (WFP) estimates.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/07/11/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-HUNGER.php




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OPINION: Shortages are not the problem

OPINION
THE FOOD CRISIS
Shortages are not the problem
By Madeleine K. Albright and John D. Podesta
Published: July 9, 2008
There was a glimmer of good news in the global food price crisis when Japan announced it would release a portion of its imported rice stockpile and the high level UN Food and Agriculture Organization secured financial commitments for short-term food aid and increased research and development into new seeds and the distribution of fertilizer to small farmers.
Nonetheless, the dismal state of affairs in the global food situation underscores the need for U.S. leadership in addressing a world agricultural system that is facing new challenges and a painful transition.
The United States can lead the way in achieving lasting global food security with a renewed commitment to long-term investment in agricultural development in the world's poorest nations. Japan, as the host nation of the Group of 8 summit meeting, and with U.S. concurrence, must go further than its earlier announcements on rice and release up to 1 million tons of its current stockpile.
Key rice producers around the world, including India, Pakistan and Vietnam, should follow suit and fulfill their recent promises to tap their own surpluses to feed the global market.
In the last three years, food prices worldwide have risen 83 percent, sowing the seeds of increased malnutrition, hunger and political instability. Since 2003, the price of rice has been on a steady climb upward and has risen 141 percent in the last year alone. For much of the world, rice is a key component of the daily diet. Three billion people rely on rice for a third of their calories each day.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/09/opinion/edalbright.php






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Letter to the IHT: A hungry world

A hungry world
Your editorial "The Group of 8 and man-made hunger" (July 7) only touches the surface of what is becoming our planet's most dire and dangerous problem: world hunger.
On the top end, we see oil-rich countries, like those in the United Arab Emirates, creating the most beautiful cities and buildings that are the result of increasing oil wealth and very small populations. On the low end, we cry when we hear of mass starvation in many African countries, as well as the result of uncontrollable environmental pollution in countries like China, now one of the world's largest petroleum consumer, like the United States.
How have we reached this situation in which farmers in many countries, including poorer ones like Brazil, are growing crops like corn and sugar cane solely for the production of biofuels, which also pollute the environment and contribute to global warming?
Don't the governments in countries that produce the most biofuels realize that every liter of ethanol takes several kilograms of food crops, and water, out of the mouths of human beings?
And now, to make things worse, intense flooding in America and China (often said to be a result of global warming) is depriving everyone of food supplies as well. The message that comes out of the G-8 summit meeting in Japan should be one of trying to save our environment, which in the long run will help prevent the catastrophes that are causing so much human misery today.
If this message doesn't get out, then we are all facing an even worse time on this good earth. After all, just as you can't eat oil, you can't eat ethanol.
Maurice Picow, Netanya, Israel
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/08/opinion/edletters.php




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