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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Minister resigns over Japanese rice scandal (IHT)

TOKYO: Japan's agriculture minister resigned Friday in a widening scandal over rice contaminated with mold and pesticide that was sold as food for thousands of people, including schoolchildren and nursing home patients.
Agriculture Minister Seiichi Ota's departure only seven weeks after he took office was a further embarrassment to the teetering government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who announced recently his own resignation amid a parliamentary stalemate.
"I met with Prime Minister Fukuda and told him my decision to resign, considering the seriousness of the tainted rice problem for society," Ota said. The chief cabinet secretary, Nobutaka Machimura, would take over as the interim farm minister, the government said.
Japanese consumers have been horrified in recent weeks over the discovery that contaminated rice intended for industrial uses such as the manufacture of glue had been distributed instead as food to thousands of people.
The rice, imported from China, Vietnam and the United States, was shipped to food companies, schools, day care centers and nursing homes, the government said. News reports said it was also discovered in rice balls sold at convenience stores.
"We deeply regret causing worries over food safety," Machimura told a news conference. "We recognize that this is a very serious situation."
The rice was tainted with the pesticide methamidophos at concentrations that exceeded government regulations, but were too low to threaten anyone's health, officials say. There have been no reports of anyone getting sick from the rice.
The discovery is the latest in a string of food scandals including the false labeling of meat, vegetables and sweets, and Chinese-made dumplings that sickened at least 10 people in Japan.
Ota's resignation comes just days before the governing Liberal Democratic Party's election Monday to choose a new prime minister. The winner is expected to be elected by Parliament to succeed Fukuda two days later.
Japan's top opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, said the resignation was an attempt by the ruling party to halt damage from the scandal before calling parliamentary elections, possibly later this year.
The rice scandal has been particularly damaging in Japan, where consumers are notoriously finicky about food safety. One distributor apparently involved in the sales reportedly committed suicide this past week.
The government so far has tracked down a rice trader in Osaka, western Japan, who shipped the tainted rice to about 370 food companies, including liquor and sweets makers.
But local reports have said that several chemical companies, including a glue maker, also shipped tainted rice as food, and an Agriculture Ministry official said Friday that the government had yet to "grasp the full scope" of the rice scandal.
The Agriculture Ministry has been rocked repeatedly by scandals in recent years, starting when then-farm minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide in May 2007.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/19/asia/japan.php





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Anti-tank mine kills 5 and wounds 3 in Cambodia (IHT)

PHNOM PENH: A truck hit an anti-tank mine in a former stronghold of Cambodia's ultra-communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, killing at least five people and wounding three, police said on Sunday.
The victims of Friday's accident in the northwestern district of Anlong Veng included women and children who were travelling in a truck carrying rice to a mill, police said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/07/asia/OUKWD-UK-CAMBODIA-MINE.php




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Religious violence in India also has economic undertones (IHT)

A defaced portrait of Jesus hung on the wall of a destroyed home in a village in Orissa state, where mob violence has killed at least 16 people since last week. (Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

The violence was prompted by the Aug. 23 murder in Orissa of Laxmanananda Saraswati, who had been associated with a Hindu radical group opposed to fellow Hindus' converting to Christianity. Although a letter left at the scene claimed that Maoist rebels carried out the attack, many Hindus blame Christians instead.
Non-Christians have long resented the conversions - the most recent Indian census, in 2001, states that 2.3 percent of the population is Christian - but tensions have increased as India's economy has taken off.
Christian missionaries in India have focused on indigenous and lower-caste groups, including untouchables, or Dalits. Despite laws dating almost to Indian independence in 1947, Dalits are often discriminated against or worse. They are sometimes denied basic amenities, such as clean water; relegated to hazardous jobs; and beaten, raped or killed because of their social status.
Conversion to Islam or Christianity does not erase caste identity completely, but Christianity and other non-Hindu religions offer a possible escape by providing schooling for anyone who wants to attend, including Dalits. Christian education often includes classes in English, which are crucial for anyone who wants to join India's service businesses, including hotels, or to break into even the lowest levels of the information technology industry fueling much of the country's growth.
"Across India today, the disenfranchised and repressed peoples, the tribes and the low castes are exiting the caste system" that is entrenched in the Hindu religion, said Joseph D'souza, the president of the All Indian Christian Council and an advocate for Dalit rights.
They are converting not only to Christianity, he said, but to Buddhism, Islam and Marxist atheism.
"People are in revolt" after 60 years of their rights being trampled, he said, adding, "It has nothing to do with any particular religion."
But the conversions occur as many in India's rural areas, including Kandhamal, see themselves as left behind economically. The area's 650,000 people subsist mainly by growing and selling rice, turmeric, ginger and forest products.

"The conflict is increasing because we are trying to educate the people and enlighten them," said Pastor Thomas Varghese, 56, in an interview in Raikia, where he has lived for 10 years. He said he ran about three kilometers, almost two miles, and spent a night in the jungle to save his life last week, after a mob that included nine people he recognized tried to kill him.
But Pramod Pradhan, a young Hindu farmer in Tiangia village, views the conversions differently, and echoed the feelings of many of the state's Hindus. "Christian missionaries lured Hindus to convert to Christianity. They bring a lot of money to do that."
Padma Charan Panda, an upper-caste Hindu and a turmeric trader who was watching a televised debate on the issue in Raikia, said "Christian traders exploit poor and illiterate" people.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/04/asia/india.php

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Western investors discover Romania's underused rice paddies

VLADENI, Romania: Romania's Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu loved the Italian specialty risotto, but he probably would have hated to see Romania's rice farms being taken over by Italian and other Western companies.As the world price of rice has risen - tripling this year and leading to scarcity worries and export curbs by big producers in Asia - European farmers have begun to expand eastward.In particular, they are buying up rice paddies in Romania, many of which were abandoned after the overthrow of Ceausescu and the end of Communism in Romania in 1989. This gives Romania, an impoverished Balkan state with water-rich lowlands, a hot climate and rich soil, the chance to become a top European rice producer in coming years."Western expertise gives rice a new future in Romania," said Ion Dragusin, 63, who headed rice farming in Vladeni under Ceausescu.Rice has never been a popular food in Romania, where wheat and corn are major crops. But Ceausescu was known to like risotto, and, according to a cook who prepared food for him at a hunting lodge in the Carpathian Mountains, he often enjoyed a bowl of rice pudding.
In the 1970s, following the example of China and North Korea, Ceausescu forced thousands of newly landless peasants and convicts to work vast paddies around the village of Vladeni in eastern Romania, part of a grand plan to make Romania self-sufficient.Now, the rice days are returning."Romania has a great potential," said Jean-Pierre Brun, president of the London Rice Brokers Association. "You need flat land, an easy source of water, which is the Danube, and warm weather. With all these available, Romania has very good conditions to produce rice."Rice also has potential, on a smaller scale, in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Hungary, Brun said.The Danube River has 20 times the water reserves of the Po Basin, which supplies Italy's paddies. That gives Romania a competitive advantage over Italy, the top European rice producer, and No.2 Spain."We will produce at lower costs," Angelo Dario Scotti, chief executive of Riso Scotti, the first Western company to get a foothold in Romania.Since 2003, Riso Scotti, which is based in Italy, has invested tens of millions of euros to buy 7,000 hectares, or 17,300 acres, of fragmented plots in Romania and to build a processing plant in Vladeni."We knew lots of abandoned land was available and the climate was perfect," said Ugo Perruca, a Riso Scotti executive. "We aim to stop buying at 10,000 hectares by next year but the rest will be grabbed by Italian, French and local investors. We are in the process of convincing farmers to come to Romania."A handful of Italian and Spanish farmers have begun to exploit smaller acreage near the Danube port of Braila, in eastern Romania, and in western Romania. Their rice is processed at the Vladeni plant. Land prices have soared to €1,000, or $1,530, a hectare from €200 five years ago, but they are still six times lower than in Italy.Most of the world's rice is grown and consumed in Asia. The European Union produces around 2.2 million tons of rice a year on 500,000 hectares of land, and imports an additional one million tons. Perruca said Romania would produce 40,000 tons of rice this year, and estimated Romania's rice-growing land at 40,000 to 50,000 hectares in the next five years.With the planned doubling of capacity at the Vladeni plant in the next five years, Romania could become an exporter of more than 100,000 tons a year, cutting EU imports by 10 percent.According to the Agriculture Ministry, Romania has 15 million hectares of arable land, of which around 3 million to 5 million are unused.But the cost of modern farming methods and the fragmentation of ownership that occurred when nationalized land was privatized after the fall of communism means it will take time for Romanian farmers to embrace rice.The ministry is encouraging small holders to consolidate production.Riso Scotti spent up to €1,500 a hectare to improve the quality of land, rebuild and expand a vast network of canals and revive pumping equipment inherited from the Communist era.Without cash, owners of tiny patches of muddy soil will struggle to irrigate their land and are eager to sell, Dragusin said. Modern rice cultivation, using specially designed harvesters, employs only a handful of workers compared with the thousands of peasants working in Ceausescu's rice fields."I remember seeding and harvesting by hand with the sickle," Dragusin said. "Walking barefoot through wet fields was very hard," he said. "Yields were large, but losses were huge. Those times are gone."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/rice.php





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Rise in food prices has Bolivian coca farmers planting rice

SINAHOTA, Bolivia: Soaring food prices may yet achieve what the United States has spent millions of dollars trying to do: persuade Bolivian farmers to sow their fields with crops other than coca, cocaine's raw ingredient.
The unlikely advocate for change is the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, who as leader of a powerful coca growers' union fought U.S. crop-substitution programs for two decades. But rising grain prices and food shortages have made Morales reconsider, and he is now asking coca farmers to supplement their crops with rice and corn as a way of holding down coca production while helping to feed the poorest country in South America.
U.S. programs have often banned the planting of coca - a small, green leaf sacred to Andean peoples and the base ingredient of cocaine - as a condition for farmers to receive aid for trying new crops.
In his own twist on alternative development, Morales is willing to split the difference: Growers can maintain up to one "cato" of coca - about a tenth of a hectare, or a third of an acre - which earns them about 720 bolivianos, or $100, a month while they receive a loan to plant other products.
The cato limit - in practice since 2004 - is seen by U.S. drug officials as a questionably legal concession to drug smugglers, but it has become the linchpin of Morales's strategy to fight narcotics while supporting the leaf's traditional use as a mild stimulant with medicinal qualities.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/america/bolivia.php





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Dairy Princess Diaries Recommends

Mandy at the Dairy Princess Diaries' has recommendation for a fellow farm blog: http://massaorganics.blogspot.com/

"Greg Massa and his family," she writes, "are 'country neighbors' of ours, growing delicious, organic brown rice on their farm while raising their brood of kids in their beautiful rice straw bale home. Even though we're just a couple of miles down the road and know we can stop by any time, I love catching up with them on their blog when we all get crazy busy. :)"






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In the rice basket and bazaars of Iran, they feel the pain

CHALUS, Iran: From the lush paddies of northern Iran to the dusty grain bazaars of Tehran, the pain and paradoxes of rising food and fuel prices are starkly on display.
Rice prices have more than doubled in Iran since March, but farmers working from sunrise to sunset in the rice-growing northern region around Chalus, a city on the Caspian Sea, say little of that money goes into their pockets.
"Traders bought our rice very cheap. They have put it in storage and now capital investors are selling it for a high price," Baqer Kefayati said at his farm in Dasht-e Nesha. "We did not make a profit, but traders did."
Capital investors are wealthy traders who buy rice wholesale from farmers. Dealers buy rice in small amounts from capital investors and sell it to shops. They act as brokers and tend not to make large sums of money.
Some brokers blame the government, saying its tardiness this year in importing rice, a staple in Iran, helped fuel the price increase by creating a vacuum that could be exploited.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/25/business/rice26.php




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A professor's food revolution starts with rice

ITHACA, New York: Many a professor dreams of revolution. But Norman Uphoff, working in a leafy corner of the Cornell University campus, is leading an inconspicuous one centered on solving the global food crisis. The secret, he says, is a new way of growing rice.Rejecting old customs as well as the modern reliance on genetic engineering, Uphoff, 67, an emeritus professor of government and international agriculture with a trim white beard and a tidy office, advocates a management revolt.Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth.The method, called the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, emphasizes the quality of individual plants over the quantity. It applies a less-is-more ethic to rice cultivation.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/18/business/rice.php






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