Nigeria: Food shortage/state of energency

 

Nigerians experienced an almost twenty five per cent increase in their food bills in May.

Following on here from a post on poverty in Nigeria, 5 July, it is now reported that:

‘A state of emergency has been declared in Nigeria as a result of food shortages and surging prices, with the country’s government announcing a range of measures to address the crisis.

On Thursday, it was announced that fertilizers and grains will “immediately” be released to farmers, and 500,000 hectares of farmland and river basins will be activated for year-round farming.

The move will also expand the central bank’s role in financing the agricultural value chain.

“We declared a state of emergency and unveiled a comprehensive intervention plan on food security, affordability, and sustainability, taking decisive action to tackle food inflation,” President Bola Tinubu said on Twitter.

Tinubu emphasized that the goal of the intervention was to promote agriculture and increase job creation, pledging that “no one will be left behind” in his government’s efforts to ensure “affordable, plentiful food.”

Attahiru Bafarawa, a former governor of Nigeria’s Sokoto State, had warned earlier this month about banditry in the country’s north, saying it threatens food security and was a “serious disaster.”

Africa’s largest economy has seen a surge in the cost of food and transportation due to the president’s removal of fuel subsidies and sweeping exchange-rate reform since May.

In a statement on Thursday, government spokesperson Dele Alake said “savings from the fuel subsidy removal” would be directed at revamping the agricultural sector.

A National Commodity Board will be established and charged with reviewing food prices and maintaining a “strategic food reserve that will be used as a price stabilization mechanism for critical grains and other food items,” Alake said.

The cost of food in Nigeria had increased by 24.82% in May compared to the same time last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). It explained that the year-on-year increase in food inflation was caused, among other things, by price hikes in oil, yam, bread, cereals, and fish.’

We will keep on saying it; the solution is socialism.

Realism is needed not myths

Isn’t socialism some sort of utopian fantasy proposal? 

What we do know is that the reality today is 80 people possess the same quantity of wealth as 3.5 billion and there exists many painful truths about economic injustices and the increasing gap between the rich and poor,  the shocking condition of men, women and children and the rise of political corruption. There is now posed a direct threat to the planet itself where capitalism destroys the planet and necessitates the extraction and burning of fossil fuels at a wildly unsustainable rate. Moreover, such policies and practices do not place the blame where it rightly lies but accuses working-class people for personal failure rather than a failure of the system. The machinery of government and its institutions are now commanded and controlled by corporate zombies, the walking brain-dead who have created a world of horror and fear. People are being turned into fools because we believe the lies that are fed to us.

Politics matters only when it changes the way people think, but it must also do more. It must not only inform, but also provoke people to act, to take collective solidarity action. We, in the Socialist Party, should find ways to make education central to politics, to develop new strategies and tactics of collective resistance.

The myth that African agriculture needs help from rich Western countries, is constantly spun out by the media, investors, agribusiness companies and other transnationals. The ‘Africa needs our help’ narrative, the game is played so that a handful of truths are used to smuggle some hugely significant lies past unsuspecting governments, NGOs and civil society.

It is true that one in four people in Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished, and that Africa has the lowest levels of agricultural productivity in the world, with extremely low levels of inputs like fertilizers, improved seeds and irrigation. It is also true that high population growth rates, high levels of poverty, poor infrastructure and low levels of investment have compounded the problem and made food difficult to access for millions of people. It is certainly true that millions of people in Africa suffer from hunger and malnutrition. But the false conclusion is that with the financial and technical help provided by rich countries and international development agencies – such as the $10 billion of ‘responsible private investments’ committed through the New Alliance to date – employment and food production will receive a huge boost and Africa will finally be able to feed itself. Crucially missing from this analysis is as why this has happened in a continent that used to be self-sufficient in food in the 1960s.

There are two main reasons for this, and they point to a very different solution to the problem of African poverty.

Firstly, Africa’s agricultural production was designed during the colonial era to benefit rich countries in the North with their enormous appetite for raw materials and luxury (non-staple) foods. In 2011, the top five exports out of Africa (by value) were cocoa beans, coffee, cotton, rubber and tobacco; more useful for satisfying rich consumers than feeding poor communities.

Secondly, African countries have been forced to deregulate their trade by rich countries and financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These institutions continue to lend money to developing countries while encouraging them to privatize public services and deregulate their economies. So, countries end up importing staple foods like wheat, palm oil, maize, sugar and soya-bean oil – crops largely produced by rich countries in the North, which can afford to heavily subsidize their agricultural sector. They have also opened up Africa to agribusiness companies that are rapidly increasing their control of resources such as land, water and labour.

The media, transnational corporations and government agencies tell us that Africa needs GM technology and chemical fertilizers to increase crop yields. What they don’t tell us is that the use of GM seeds actually leads to falling crop yields in the long term, and the increased use of pesticides and herbicides. Ignored is the fact that more and more evidence has been pouring in which shows that sustainable agriculture – or agroecology – can produce yields comparable to, and often larger than, industrial agriculture. But that’s not all. There are also huge positive knock-on effects of agroecology, such as increasing biodiversity, increasing income and employment opportunities, reducing the gender gap, improving health and nutrition, and helping to mitigate climate change.

What we need to do is challenge the myth of corporate-controlled agriculture or calling for reform of the aid system and unfair trade agreements but instead promote the principles of agroecology and food sovereignty to help people regain control of Africa’s food system and that is only possible by replacing the exploitative global economic system - capitalism. The peoples of Africa and the rest of the world need socialism. It can only be achieved globally. 

The capitalist logic

Half a century after agricultural productivity surged in Asia, eastern Europe and Latin America, with cereal yields jumping from 1 tonne a hectare in 1960 to more than 3 tonnes last year, Africa has yet to see a serious increase in production. Cereal yields in sub-Saharan countries have risen to only 1.3 tonnes per hectare, up from 0.8 tonnes.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, productivity in African farming failed to keep pace with population growth. Any increases reflected bringing more land under cultivation rather than increasing yields. As a result, domestic food production per capita fell, forcing African countries to rely on imports, and spend billions of US dollars each year buying commodities such as wheat, sugar and rice from international trading houses.  The over-reliance on food imports put countries against the wall once wholesale prices surged. The 2007-08 food crisis – the first in three decades – which saw record prices for rice and wheat, triggered riots in several African countries, including protests in Nigeria and Senegal.

Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s agriculture minister, told an audience: “Nigeria was food self-sufficient in the 1960s and well-known for its global position in major agricultural commodities.” Then something changed. “We found oil and became too dependent on it. Nigeria soon became a net food importer, spending on average $11bn a year on wheat, rice, sugar and fish alone.”

Why can't Africa feed itself??

Sub-Sahara Africa has ample fertile land, plenty of water and a generally favourable climate for food production. It also has some of the fastest growing economies. Yet, the region is the world’s most food insecure. Even though 70 per cent of Africans are farmers, the continent continues to experience hunger and famine, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region. One in four people in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished, and every third child is stunted, according to a 2012 human development report of the United Nations Development Programme. Ironically, countries that heavily rely on agriculture are worst affected by food insecurity. That is because 90 per cent of Africa’s food supply is produced by smallholders. And they produce so little, that half of them are food insecure themselves.

 “The main reason for Africa’s food insecurity is lack of political will,” Nelson Agyemang, Vice- President of the Ghana Cooperative for Agricultural Producers, said during a recent agriculture conference in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The reasons for food insecurity are complex. They include crop failure due to droughts and floods, poverty, conflict and HIV. But misguided policies and weak institutions are the main culprits for hunger, experts argue.

“Chronic food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa stems from decades of poor governance,” said UNDP regional director for Africa Tegegnework Gettu.

Self-serving elites are monopolizing state revenues while emptying the country’s resources

We can feed the world

It is so ingrained that many people cling to the idea that Africa can’t feed itself—and maybe never will. That conclusion, however common, is wrong.  In Uganda in East Africa and in the 15 countries of West Africa, food production now outpaces population growth.  10 African countries are posting annual output increases of 6 percent, more than twice the rate of population growth.  Even infamously food-insecure Malawi and Ethiopia are growing record amounts of crops and even export surpluses to their neighbors. Long ignored, Africa’s “forgotten” crops, including cassava, sunflower seeds, and cowpeas, are being re-discovered and have in the last two decades rapidly expanded in production.

This in spite of use of high-quality seeds and fertilizer is minimal.  Africa has the greatest amount of idle arable land on the planet. For example, the Guinea Savannah zone covers around 600 million hectares in West Africa—through Uganda and Tanzania and encompassing Malawi, Zambia, Angola, and Mozambique—which is around one-third of the total area of sub-Saharan Africa. Of this, 400 million hectares can be used for agriculture. However, less than 10 percent of this area is being cultivated today. Less than 5 percent of land in the sub-Sahara being  irrigated.

 African farmers in the early 1960s supplied 8 percent of the world’s tradable food. That figure stands at less than 2 percent today. Sub-Saharan Africa can produce enough food to feed its peopleand can feed some of the rest of the world too.

We can feed ourselves

Ton Dietz, the director of the Afrika Studie Centrum, based in Leiden, Netherlands, one of Europe's leading think tanks on Africa, questions the image of Africa so commonly seen as a hungry continent. His research showed that total basic food production in Africa has actually not only kept pace with population growth, but has increased proportionally faster than has the population. Overall Africa produces more than enough food to feed itself.

Research has shown that the amount of calories consumed per person had actually increased in all of west Africa, but had decreased in all east African countries between 1961 to 2009 despite the region having some of the most fertile agricultural land available on the continent.
In 1961 every nation in Africa produced domestically more than 100 percent of its domestic food supply. Now most African countries produce less than its domestic supply and therefore are becoming more dependent on food imports, even though they grow enough food to feed themselves.
In Benin, Mozambique and the two Sudans all show large drops in the portion domestically produced, and large increases in imported food and stock variations. Sudan and Mozambique can be partly explained by the wars that plagued both, but during the first part of this century Mozambique has had a domestic peace in a nation with extraordinary agriculture potential. The research showed that post-harvest loss is the major problem in the Sudans and not weather conditions. The same is true for Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Mozambique. Africa lacks infrastructures for adequate storage and refrigeration.

We can feed ourselves

 Henri Josserand, a consultant for Food Across Borders, declared the West African sub-region was food self-sufficient despite critical deficit in some regions. He said the sub-region had been able to feed itself over the last 50 years, with no serious increase in the volume of food imported. “Although the population in the region has increased tremendously over the last half-century, so has food production also increased to commensurate the increasing population,” he observed. Josserand is an expert with over 30 years of work in economic development, agricultural and food policy, food security, vulnerability analysis, and early warning systems.

 Food Across Borders is an initiative driven by sub-regional body Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

 40 percent of Nigerians do not have sufficient food on daily basis asserts Professor Babatope  Alabadan of the Federal University of Technology, Minna. The professor of agricultural engineering blamed the food shortages in the country on huge food losses due to inadequate storage facilities. Despite the favourable natural condition for food production in the country, food is still being imported into the country to meet up demand because of huge food losses.

Food for the rich

East Africa was hit by its worst drought in half a century last year, leaving millions of people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia hungry and triggering an outpouring of emergency aid from the European Union and other major donors. Yet while relief workers fought to avert a drought-induced famine in Africa, packets of Kenyan green beans and avocados and buckets of decorative flowers from Ethiopia were available in European markets.

“It’s easier to know the demands of the market in Europe than we do in our own neighbourhood,” said Mohamed Ibn Chambas, who heads the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States, known as the ACP, which works with the EU to coordinate trade and development assistance. “In a particular [African] region you can have an acute shortage of goods, whereas next door you can have a bumper crop,” Chambas said.

The south-north food flow has created willing foreign markets for African farmers, while home-grown goods aren’t getting to other Africans who are surviving on international relief aid flown in during food shortages.

The EU imports 40% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural exports – including nuts, fresh-cut flowers, tea, coffee, citrus fruits and vegetables

“It is difficult to imagine the sense in the system, because when we import, say, green beans from Kenya, we’re taking imbedded water from a drought-prone country, and then we’re putting into our supermarkets, into our fridges and then we’re throwing it way uneaten...But equally, when you talk to governments down there they say, ‘we need the money’. ” Tim Benton, a University of Leeds professor of population ecology said.

With nearly half of the more than 800 million Sub-Saharan Africans living below the UN’s poverty line of less than $1.25 per day, farming is seen as a way to providing lucrative exports of food and biofuel crops.

Access for Food

History is riddled with examples of the poor dying of hunger when food was plentiful. Classic amongst these is the famine which wracked the West African Sahel during the early 1970s. While people were dying of hunger in Senegal, Mali and Niger, peanuts — a key sauce ingredient and source of protein across the region — were being exported to Europe.

Central to the philanthrocapitalist worldview is a belief that private enterprise is the fundamental agent of progressive change and that business acumen trumps other forms of expertise. It is also very convenient when a company’s profit motive lines up nicely with an initiative promoting the end of African hunger. The G8, the world’s richest democracies, launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) last May. This $3 billion commitment by the G8 plus 21 African and 27 multinational companies aims to lift 50 million people in Africa out of poverty by 2022. Nearly 30 companies are involved with the NAFSN initiative (from Syngenta to Monsanto).

Cargill is a US-based large agricultural, financial and industrial corporation. Greg Page, Cargill’s chairman and chief executive, has been particularly active on the talk circuit and in the op-ed pages of American newspapers, articulating his support for NAFSN and similar initiatives. Cargill is a massive company, with revenues of $133.9 billion in 2012, which would rank No. 8 on the Fortune 500 list if it were publicly traded. It operates in 66 countries with some 133,000 employees. In voicing his support for the NAFSN approach, Mr Page outlines the need for free trade, growing crops where there is a comparative advantage to do so, property rights reform, and access to fertiliser, quality seed and mechanised equipment.

In a July 2012 speech in Minneapolis, US, Page compared Zambia and Mozambique. Cargill does a considerable amount of business in Zambia, which allows 99-year land-use permits that can be transferred between buyers and sellers, or transferred from one generation of farmers to the next, Page said. This type of policy encourages agricultural investment, spurring food production in the country, he argued. Last year Zambia produced a million more tonnes of maize than the country could eat — and Zambia is now a ‘net exporter in a continent of food shortage,’ he added.

In Mozambique, however, land-use rights are conferred for half the length of time and permits are non-transferable between parties, Page said. ‘If you look at the soil types, the rainfall patterns and everything else, there is no demonstrable reason that Mozambique should not produce more food than Zambia, and yet in the absence of the right legal frameworks, they’ve not been able to do that.’

What Page fails to understand is that producing more food in the aggregate is not synonymous with improving household food security. While Zambia may now be a food exporter, this does not necessarily mean that Zambia’s historically food insecure groups are better off. Instead, food insecurity remains a major issue for certain segments of the population, including child-headed households and those taking care of orphans (largely due to HIV/AIDS), the unemployed in urban areas, and smallholder farmers in the drought-prone, southern and western parts of the country (where an overreliance on drought-vulnerable maize has made the situation even worse). Furthermore, the Zambian government, because of its market-oriented land tenure legislation, has leased 8.8 percent of its agricultural land to foreign entities, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. These companies and foreign governments are primarily interested in producing food for export. Their interventions have done little to improve household food security amongst poor Zambians.

The best way to address food insecurity for the poor is emphasising access and not production.  The big money, for input providers, agro-processors and traders, is in building more capital-intensive and market-integrated African farming systems. There is little to no profit to be made from eradicating hunger.

Africa can feed its people

Africa could feed itself if trade restrictions were reduced and fertile land was put to good use, according to the World Bank.

Just 5% of African cereal imports come from other African countries, it said. “The potential to increase agricultural production in Africa is enormous,” the bank said in the report. “Yields for many crops are a fraction of what farmers elsewhere in the world are achieving and output could easily increase two to three times if farmers were to use updated seeds and technologies.”

 "Too often borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice-president for Africa.

profit system - it is insane

  GRAIN researcher, Devlin Kuyek, co-author of "The Great Food Robbery"

"...with climate change, we also have to change the way food is distributed. More drought, dry weather, and water crises are going to mean a substantial loss of food production. You have to question the global system of food distribution; it's set up around profit right now. Who gets to eat and who doesn't is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. Who gets to eat and who doesn't is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. A handful of people in Northern countries deciding whether Africa is going to eat or not is insane."

"Africa is increasingly being targeted as a centre of production for global markets. The talk now is that Africa is one of the last frontiers because much of Africa is not under the model of export production. Land and water are still in the hands of local communities. So there's a big push to industrialize agriculture for export. Unfortunately, African governments are colluding with corporations who want to pursue agribusiness in their countries, with the help of the World Bank and bilateral and multilateral donors."


"...programmes like AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa], are openly talking about small scale farmers as obstacles to development that need to be replaced by a new generation of commercial, modern farmers. This is code language for big farms, often owned by foreign capital, that use the machines, seeds, pesticides and others inputs sold by multinational corporations like AGCO and Monsanto, and that supply the global trade networks of corporations like Cargill and Olam."

 "In Ethiopia, you have a government that has stated its policy is to go from 80 percent rural population to 20 percent rural population. Who can imagine what all those people are going to do? What's the plan there? What jobs are they going to have? You can't say that this is about people in Africa choosing to move to cities. People are being forced out of their lands through mining projects, land acquisitions, and overall bad policies."

Full interview at  http://allafrica.com/stories/201205250403.html

Hollow Promises

"Today we commit to launch a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to accelerate the flow of private capital to African agriculture...This New Alliance will lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next decade," the G-8 said in a statement.

Oxfam warned the announcement focuses too heavily on the role of the private sector to tackle the complex challenges of food insecurity in the developing world. The organization called instead for G8 leaders to keep the promises they have already made to help developing countries. Remember the 2005 G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland? The USA, Canada, Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Japan and Russia promised Africans to provide an extra $25bn a year for Africa as part of a $50bn increase in financial assistance by 2010. Well, unsurprisingly, the extra $25 billion hasn't been realised and neither has the additional $50 billion. Remember three years ago, at the G8 Summit in L'Aquila, Italythe leaders of the world's richest countries pledged $22 billion to poor countries that had goods plans to tackle hunger. Seven months away from the end of the L'Aquila initiative but the G8 countries are still fulfil their pledges.

"The New Alliance is neither new nor a true alliance," said Oxfam's Lamine Ndiaye.

The G-8 is promising to simply point their private companies towards Africa's shores.  As if  private companies haven't already jumped on the Africa bandwagon  to make profits for themselves. If they can't make a healthy return, then why should they invest? Altruism? Private-sector entities "don't answer to other G8 leaders, they answer to their shareholders," noted Oxfam's Porter McConnell in a blog post.

 Nor is it the lack of Western agricultural investment is the reason that our children either die of hunger or suffer stunted growth. Quite, the contrary when many countries are confronted by the inward investment of international land-grab and the consequent displacement of local people to make way for the creation of commercial cash-crop agriculture. With global food demand expected to grow by at least 70 percent by 2050 and with sub-Saharan Africa home to up to 60 percent of the world's unused arable land. A half century ago, Africa was a food exporter. Many wish for it to be again but without feedng its own people first.

Agribusiness giants such as DuPont, Monsanto and Cargill , along with smaller companies will commit some billions of dollars for projects to help farmers in the developing world build local markets and improve productivity.The New Alliance is a top down plan that does not reflect what many people in poor countries say they want or need. The solutions for problems must come from within, not without. One doesn't need a huge surge of dollars to feed the mouths of our children.

Neil Watkins, policy director at the U.S. aid group ActionAid voiced concern it may be difficult to link up the world's giant agribusiness companies with some of its poorest farm laborers. "These marginal farmers aren't likely to be targets for corporate investment," Watkins said. "Corporate investment is not a silver bullet for food security in Africa."

Africa's salvation won't come from Camp David but from African farmers and small-scale producers, particularly women. Smallholder farmers need the freedom to pursue their own growing strategies.

egypt's food future

Nearly all 82 million Egyptians, along with almost all agricultural lands, are squeezed into just five per cent of the nation's total land area: A strip running eight to 15 kilometres wide along the Nile River and fanning out through the Delta. It's as if the entire population of the United States and all of our agriculture were clustered within 60 kilometres of the Mississippi. That leaves only one twenty-fifth of a hectare of agricultural land per Egyptian, or a 20-by-20-metre postage stamp of ground sown to wheat, rice, maize, lentils, beans, vegetables, cotton, animal forage, and date palms. As a result, Egypt has become the world's number-one importer of wheat, and imports a large share of many other food requirements.

The country's crops - all irrigated - are generally very productive, but with every grain harvest, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients are removed from the soil and must be replaced. Berseem clover, a legume that pulls its nitrogen from the air, is a ubiquitous fodder crop, and the nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich manure from livestock can be returned to the soil. And food crops are often interplanted with date palms, whose long-lived roots help hold the soil. But neither practice can replace the nutrients that are sucked from the land year-round by most food crops. Therefore, Egypt's farmers have little choice but to apply very large quantities of synthetic fertilisers in order to maintain their crop yields, making grains like wheat even more costly to produce. And those farmers, the large majority of whom cultivate plots of less than a hectare and a half, are not cash-rich, meaning that the government must step in to pay them a subsidised price for grain in order to keep the farm economy going. Egyptian families - 42 per cent of whom live below the international $2.50-per-person-per-day poverty line - struggle to meet their monthly requirement for conventionally produced, no-frills fava beans, lentils and vegetables at prices they can afford.

Prime lands of the Nile Valley and Delta are being lost at an alarming rate to urban sprawl. Upriver from Cairo, for example, huge private homes with walled-in compounds are sprouting across the landscape in less time than it takes to grow and harvest a crop of wheat. Although the total quantity of farmland in Egypt has increased over the years thanks to the "reclamation" of desert through sprinkler and drip irrigation, those new lands are much less productive than the river-valley soils that have supported Egyptian society since before the time of the Pharaohs. There have long been laws against building on agricultural land in Egypt, but enforcement has always been lax. During the past year, with the government otherwise occupied, there was virtually no enforcement at all. Powerful economic interests have jumped into that vacuum, and land-grabbing and construction on cropland have accelerated. Economically stressed farmers have a hard time resisting offers of big money from aggressive developers.

If Egyptians manage to wrest economic and political power from the oligarchs who have held it for so long, they will have a chance to protect their agricultural landscape and ensure a good food supply for everyone. But until that transformation happens, achieving food security along the Nile will remain a day-to-day struggle.

Extracts from
Stan Cox, research coordinator at The Land Institute, Kansas, USA.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201237104725536741.html

there is enough

Meredith Alexander argues that global hunger is not a result of food shortages, but poverty and inequality. Food itself is almost never the problem. Instead, people are hungry because they lack money and power. Even now in the Horn of Africa where 10 million people are at risk of starvation, food is available in the markets. It is just too expensive for poor people to buy. Production is vital, but the question of how food is distributed is more important. Increasing the size of the pie means nothing to people who aren’t allowed near the table. There are proven policies that could ensure every man, woman and child on the planet gets enough to eat. Ultimately, hunger has little to do with food and everything to do with justice.

Full article here

But yet again the proposed policies and reforms suggested does not address the root problem - capitalism's drive for profits and their accumulation.

Wasting Away

A survey around Kampala's urban markets, retialers and restaurants unveiled the stack reality that while food prices are soaring and many people are dropping dead or are going to bed hungry every night, unimaginable huge quantities of food are thrown away.

Food wastage is not unique to Uganda. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says one-third of all food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted, amounting to some 1.3 billion tonnes per year. In Italy alone, one of the countries with the highest levels of wastage, food worth $53 million is thrown away every year. This would translate into 753 million meals enough to feed the entire East Africa for two years.

Kalerwe is Kampala's largest food market. Located three kilometers north of the city, the place is where many urbanites both rich and poor gather to buy affordable food items. Many city dwellers from the adjoining slums walk up to two kilometers to buy cheap and yet quality food. Even residents from upscale Kololo, Ntinda and Nakasero drive to this market mostly on weekends to buy food. Yet despite the huge turnout of shoppers, some food remains and is either sold cheaply or thrown onto garbage skips.

"Carrots, potatoes and cassava have a short shelf life and so we increase the quantities sold to attract customers" Mr Simon Mukasa who operates a stall at Kalerwe. "If you fail to sell cassava by evening then you can only throw it onto garbage skips." Yet cassava is one food item that easily be dried and processed into flour.

East African Business Week witnessed a lady throwing away tomatoes she said were rotten. "Nobody can buy these," she lamented as the reject joined a pile of ripe bananas, cabbages and stale cassava. In the city, many households especially in the slums keep some cattle and goats and one would think they would struggle to get grass and other feed supplements.
Ironically in the urban townships, many cattle farmers in the neighbouring Wakiso District that surrounds Kmapala city buy a sack of banana peelings at UGshs 3000 ($1.2). This is so because there are many cattle in the villages competing for feeds while in the city, they are just thrown away on skips.

It is estimated that about 80% of restaurants in Kampala throw away at least five kgs of food everyday. "It is easier to just throw it food away in the dustbin than to store it" said Miss Jackie Achieng who runs Palms Restaurant in Nankulabye, 3 km north west of Kampala city. She admitted that she throws away food almost every day.

The problem of postharvest losses is very crucial especially in rural areas. This is due to lack of proper storage facilities and better processing methods to prolong the shelf value. Until serious efforts are made to ensure that global food production is matched with adequate storage, transportation and processing, this life-giving resource will continue to be wasted. Amid such situation it is inevitable to conclude that worldwide hunger is simply a figurative creation rather than a reality. What is at stake is the failure to manage and equitably distribute our food resources.

In the words of Shakespeare: "Distribution should undo excess and each man have enough."

from here

Why Hunger?

With one billion people going to bed hungry every day and about the same number obese the geography of hunger presents inherent contradictions. Pictures and videos roll out rapidly from drought-stricken Horn of Africa, breaking our hearts as we see children so malnourished and clinging to helpless mothers. The pictures of dead cattle complete the scenes that scream nothing but hopelessness. At the other end of the spectrum we see obese folks in rich nations struggling to hook on their double belts around their bulges.

Why are we so hungry? Why is it that unless the photos of the dead and the dying appear in the media, some African governments keep mute and do nothing about these tragedies? How come that when they do anything at all it is often just begging for aid? But the hunger in the Horn of Africa did not just happen. Reports say that there has been rain failure over the past three years and the people in those areas have been gradually reduced to a state of helplessness while no one paid attention. Some are said to have been displaced from rich ancestral lands and were forced to live in parched lands where they had no coping mechanisms and support.

Is it beyond government and institutions in the drought-stricken areas to find better ways of water management, including rain harvesting and irrigation, that would help the affected people cope and flourish? How about tested agro-ecological cultivation methods that small-scale farmers have used to great impact in parched parts of Africa, including the Tigray region of Ethiopia? Is it impossible for governments to provide basic infrastructure that would help move food from areas with good rainfall to areas that are deprived? An example is what we hear is the situation in Uganda. The north eastern part of the country is currently faced with drought and crop failures while the western part is lush, green and with bountiful harvests. The situation was the same in Zambia in 2004 when one region had food shortages while things were normal in other areas.

The food business seeks to pile up profits and not to eliminate hunger. In fact the more hungry we are, the more profit they make. It can thus be suggested that food merchants are glad to entrench hunger and keep populations dependent on their products. For many years this has been seen as the principal objective of food aid. For example, donors who insist on in-kind aid see food aid as a way to dump their surplus production on needy countries, by extension expanding the market for those products. Food aid is not free food. Apart from emergency food aid that is largely free, others like programme aid and project aid (including things like school feeding projects) are paid for by the recipient nations. It is interesting to note that as a rule 75 percent of food aid from the US must be bought, processed, transported and distributed by US companies. It is also interesting to note that only four companies control over 80 percent of the transport and delivery of food aid in the world. The transaction costs, including the costly transportation, take over 60 percent of emergency food aid costs. Food aid was a principal foreign policy tool. Till date it remains conditional and is often tied with demands for prescribed economic reforms. Hunger is a great tool for the subjugation of peoples, distortion of local food production and the building of dependency. It is a shame that African governments keep extending the beggar’s bowl rather than taking steps to fight the scourge.

Adapted from here

Africa can feed not just itself but the world. This is the claim made by Kanayo Nwanze, the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad), a specialised agency of the UN. Nwanze argues that Africa is facing the fallout of decades of neglecting agriculture, a fault that lies with African governments and aid donors. Nwanze drew a sharp contrast between Gansu province, in northwest China, and parts of Africa that cannot feed itself. He said like many parts of the world, Gansu suffers from frequent drought, limited water for irrigation and severe soil erosion. Yet despite the weather and the harsh environment, the farmers in the Gansu programme area are feeding themselves.

"It has a very harsh environment, it has only 300 millimetres of rain annually, compared to parts of the Sahel which gets 400-600 millimetres, but the government has invested in roads and electricity. We found a community willing to transform their lives by harvesting rainwater, using biogas, terracing mountain slopes. There are crops for livestock, they are growing vegetables, wheat and maize, and generating income that allows them to build resilience." He explained. The Ifad president says Africa could easily increase the use of fertilisers without making a dent on the environment, because current usage is so low. And he cites the potential to increase irrigation – only about 7% of land in the whole of Africa is irrigated, compared with more than 30% of land in Asia – and the scope for farmers to use improved seed varieties that would dramatically boost productivity. "The potential is huge," said Nwanze. "With a little investment, Africa can feed itself and it has the potential to feed the world."

From deficit to surplus

Kofi Annan cites Africa as answer to global food crisis. The number of hungry people in the world is set to top one billion again this year as rising food prices push millions more into poverty, the former secretary general of the United Nations warned. One in three Africans is chronically hungry, according to the UN, despite $3 billion being spent on food aid for the continent every year. About 70% of Africans are involved in agriculture, but almost 250 million people–a quarter of the population–are undernourished. That number has risen 100 million in the past 20 years as food production has fallen 10%, compared to an increase of 145% for the rest of the world.

“Africa is the continent which has perhaps the greatest opportunities to help find solutions to global food insecurity,” he said. “Even within existing cultivated land, a doubling of cereal yields would turn Africa into a major food surplus region.”

In the 1960s the continent was actually a net exporter of food. Fifty years later Africa imports around a quarter of its food at a cost of $30 billion a year.

can't pay - can't eat

Oxfam's Pan Africa Director from Kenya, noted that Africa is capable of producing enough food to ensure all of its citizens have enough to eat. Yet in many African countries prices are already at an all time high and even staple foods are unaffordable to many people.

"Food is about power - those with power and money can eat, those without cannot. Africa is abundant with resources, yet governments fail to invest effectively in its biggest resources - its people and its land," Irungu Houghton said.

Oxfam's campaign laid out key areas for Africa's movement to achieve food independence and feed a growing population. These include stopping "land grabs" by rich nations, trans-national corporations and local elites which the aid agency noted are giving away the key resources that the people of Africa need for food production. Women and other small-scale producers it says must have stronger rights to land and resources. According to the report land rights are of particular concern in Africa with fertile farmland and grazing land often being given over to corporate interests and used for tourism, large-scale agriculture for exports rather than feeding local people.

biofuel ban

To overcome two of Africa's most urgent problems, food insecurity and hunger, some are arguing for a ban on the production of food crops for bio fuel.

"Yes, there are droughts and floods, and yes, war and civil unrest have had a big impact on Africa's food security...," said Peter Brabeck-Letmanthe, chairman of the board at Nestle, during the World Economic Forum on Africa being held in Cape Town. "But bio fuel also has an important role to play when it comes to Africa's and the world's situation with food insecurity and hunger, as a large part of the world's agricultural production is used for the manufacturing of bio fuel," he explained. "Currently, 15% of the global maize production is turned into bio fuel. The same counts for 21.4% of the world's sugar and 45% of rapeseed. In the meantime, millions go hungry."

Food prices are higher now than at any time since 1984. Higher prices make life even more difficult for Africa's poorest, who already spend between 60 to 80 per cent of their income on food. Faced with reduced access to food and increased vulnerability to the seasonality of local food prices and markets, households are forced into unavoidable compromises, such as choosing cheaper (often less nutritious) food, selling productive assets, withdrawing children from school, forgoing healthcare, or simply eating less than they need.

The gap between the continent's domestic food supply and demand will widen as global consumption patterns continue to shift towards more profitable bio-fuels which supplant food crops.

'we export food in order to import food'

The price rises in global food has prompted certain countries to seek cheap and fertile farmland beyond their borders in order to guarantee food security for themselves. To achieve this goal such states are encouraging their domestic agro-businesses, tied to their national interests, to invest in countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Madagascar, Tanzania and Argentina, to name a few. Capital invested in far-away farms will produce food cheaply, which will then be exported back to the country where the original capital came from. In this way, the volatility of the international food market can be avoided and national food security achieved. It is important to point out that some of these include states with dreadful human rights records such as Saudi Arabia.

To accomplish this goal, a key step is to convince developing nations to give up their fertile land to foreign investors. One of the baits designed for the purpose of persuasion is the promise of infrastructure and the sharing of information and technology in agricultural science. The other promise made to host nations is of capital gained from food exports, which can then be reinvested in the country. For underdeveloped countries, who face serious food insecurity, and who are often unable to feed their population, this may sound too good to pass by.

The government of Ethiopia promises this process will mitigate the nation's chronic food insecurity and allow domestic farmers to gain knowledge from the expertise of foreign agro-business. It also says dollars gained form exporting food can alleviate Ethiopia's endemic food crises. In Ethiopia, hundreds of foreign investors grabbing fertile land at incredibly low cost. The scale of the spree is unprecedented. Investors are describing the deal as 'green gold'. Ethiopia's untilled land, located in some of the most fertile parts of the country, is now being sold to foreign interests for less than its true worth. Foreign investors are given perks, tax holidays lasting years, and essentially they are exempt from any royalties. According to the government, these lands given to foreign investors were idle lands, ready to be gobbled up into the global food system without much disturbance. However, this view depends on one's definition of 'idle land'. Pastureland may seem idle, but its usefulness is undeniable. In an effort to rush through this controversial issue unimpeded, the government has sought to bypass all transparency. It is fully aware that an open discussion on the issue would expose the absurdities of its claim. Deals with foreign investors were approved backhandedly for this reason.

Although this issue of land-grabbing by foreign interests is new to Ethiopia, it is no stranger to other parts of the developing world. The history of foreign agro-business intrusion in some Latin American and Caribbean countries is enlightening to say the least. In northeastern Brazil, the region was extensively farmed by foreign agricultural interests for centuries. Unfortunately this region has nothing to show for it now. Today the region is the poorest part of the country with the least food security and one of the highest malnutrition rates in Latin America. Contrary to the promises made by companies that farmed Brazil's fertile soil, the outcome has been very grim. In his famous book 'Open Veins of Latin America', Eduardo Galliano, commenting on Brazil's northeast, says, 'Naturally fitted to produce food, it became a place of hunger. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, the destructive and all dominating plantation left sterile rock, washed out soil, and eroded lands.' Are Ethiopia's own fertile lands headed for the same fate? What makes the current foreign agricultural adventure in Ethiopia any different?

Employment offered by these farms is purported to be a benefit for local communities. Never mind that the main reason why locals seek this work is primarily because the agro-businesses have forced them to abandon their old pastoralist way of life. Take away this option of survival and people are left with no other choice but to accept slave wages working on foreign farms. In a way the agri-business creates the labour surplus for itself and manages to keep wages extremely low. The wage paid to workers, on average about $1.50 (25 Birr) for a day's work, is nowhere near enough to survive without additional food aid. According to a recent documentary, some farm workers in southern Ethiopia complained they were getting paid seven birr per day, instead of the 25 birr initially promised. That is about 50 cents a day in dollar terms. By these estimates the lives of these workers were considerably better before the introduction of foreign agri-business. Instead of food security, food insecurity is created, perhaps even serious malnutrition. To add insult to injury none of the produce from these farms will be available to local markets. However, there is talk of selling some of the produce to aid agencies. The World Food Program intends to buy some of this grain in order to assist hungry people. Ironically, this group of intended food aid recipients will include those working to produce it in the first place !!

The people of Ethiopia are being asked to believe absurdities such as 'we export food in order to import food' as a viable economic option to guarantee national food security. However, the most basic comprehension of economics tells us this is nearly impossible. Given Ethiopia's dwindling currency exchange, what sense is there in purchasing grain from the international market, while exporting domestic grain? Can exported grain used as a cash-crop generate enough capital to be able to import food affordably and sustainably? If Indian, Saudi, and Chinese companies are extending their reach beyond their national borders to secure national food security for their domestic economy, why can't Ethiopia do this within its own lands?

Taken from here