News: Korea buys half of Madagascar's agricultural land.

I posted before about the new colonialism, when Western companies buy or lease large parts of arable land in Africa to grow food or biofuel for their own production.

Via For Those Who Want To KnowI just stumbled upon this article:

Daewoo Logistics of South Korea has secured a huge tract of farmland in Madagascar to grow food crops to send back to Seoul, in a deal said to be the largest of its kind.

The company leased 1.3m hectares of farmland - about half the size of Belgium - from Madagascar for 99 years. It planned to ship the corn and palm oil harvests back to South Korea. This deal will have half of Madagascar's arable land produce food for Korea. (Full)

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned this year that the race by agricultural commodity-importing countries to secure farmland overseas risked creating a "neo-colonial" system. A warning in the wind it seems, as more and more agro-companies make new land deals in Africa and Asia. (More)

Daewoo Logistics is not the only one leasing land in Madagascar: D1 Oils plc, the UK based producer of biodiesel, uses about 17,000 hectares of existing Jatropha plantations for its biofuel production since years. In addition to the 37,000 hectares of plantations in Africa, India and The Philippines. In addition to approximately 6,000,000 hectares of land available to the company in different countries under option to contract. (Full)

As a note worth mentioning: In Madagascar, some 50 percent of children under three years of age suffer retarded growth due to a chronically inadequate diet. (Source)

Picture courtesy of Pernille (Louder than Swahili)

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News: Wasting enough rice to feed 184 million people

There are almost 1 billion people in the world suffering from hunger. Increasing the food production, improving the type of food we grow and controlling food prices is all one side of the equation.

According to FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the world is wasting enough rice this year to feed 184 million people, about a fifth of those who are undernourished. The amount lost between harvest and consumers globally totals at least 48 million tons. Per year.

The waste goes from rodent infestations in the rice fields to primitive drying and processing techniques, poor storage, bad bagging and inadequate transport. (Full)

More on The Road about food aid, agriculture and the food crisis

Picture courtesy Enrique Soriano/Bloomberg News

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News: Who is hungry on the World Food Day?

Tomorrow Oct 16 is the World Food Day, marking the "birthday" of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. FAO was the first agency created by the United Nations to address global hunger in 1945.

Did you know 25,000 people die every day from hunger and related causes? Not in 1945, but today!
Did you know 923 million people do not have enough to eat - more than the populations of USA, Canada and the European Union together?

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) continuously updates its World Hunger Map. On this interactive worldmap you can zoom into the hunger hotspots in the world, and find out the facts.

Did you know that out of the 69 million people in Ethiopia, there currently are 31.5 million (45%) undernourished?
Did you know 21% of Indians (221 million people!) are hungry?

Use The Global Hunger Index (GHI) from International Food Policy Research Institute to find out more.

This post is part of the Blog Action Day campaign inviting bloggers to publish posts about poverty today, October 15th.

More posts on The Road about poverty, development, hunger, WFP and foodaid.

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News: Venezuela: ‘Capitalism behind biggest food crisis known’

Venezuela, along with Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia, criticised the final declaration of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Summit in Rome on June 5, arguing that the document failed to identify the true causes of rising food prices, such as agricultural subsidies and unequal trade policies imposed by developed countries.

Venezuelan ambassador to the FAO, Gladys Urbaneja Duran, objected to the document saying it lacked a “genuine humanitarian spirit” and aimed to present world hunger as merely a circumstantial crisis, when in reality it reflects a structural problem linked to the capitalist system and its mode of production and consumption.

Urbaneja rejected the position of the US delegation, which claimed the reason for the current food crisis was rapidly increasing demand from India and China, stating “The main reason is that food has been turned into yet another object of market speculation.”

According to FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, between $11 billion and $12 billion a year is spent on agricultural subsidies and restrictive tariff policies. In the absence of “clear commitments”, the Venezuelan delegate feared that the final declaration could become a “significant setback.”

“We missed an opportunity to take a firm and clear step in the struggle against the scourge of hunger”, Urbaneja concluded. (Full)


More posts on The Road about The Global Food Crisis

Source: The Road Daily
Picture courtesy Handicap International, A.Sutton

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News: Cost of solving the food crisis: $30 billion/year.

"Resolving the global food crisis could cost as much as $30 billion a year and wealthier nations are doing little to help the developing world face the problem", UN officials said at the Food Summit in Rome.

Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), opened the summit by sharply criticizing wealthy nations cutting back on agriculture programs for the world's poor and ignoring deforestation — while spending billions on carbon markets, subsidies for farmers and biofuel production.

"The developing countries did in fact forge policies, strategies and programs that — if they had received appropriate funding — would have given us world food security," Diouf, said, adding that international community finally began to mobilize to help after images of food riots and starvation emerged in the media. He said there had been plenty of meetings on the need for anti-hunger programs and agricultural development in poor nations in the last decade but not enough money to make them a reality. (Full)

More figures were slammed at the Food Summit:
$20 billion/year: cost of over-consumption by obese people in the world
$100 billion/year: indirect costs resulting from premature deaths and associated diseases, related to obesity.
$1.2 trillion: the world's spending on weapons in 2006
from $8 billion/year to $3.4 billion/year: the drop of aid in agriculture between 1984 and 2004. (Full)

It looks to me the food crisis is heading more and more towards a confrontation of North and South, Rich Nations and Poor nations. The world has a number of critical decisions to make if it wants not only to feed the hungry, but also wants to end hunger and poverty. Something it has tried to do in vain for the past half century...


More posts on The Road about the food crisis.

Picture courtesy Pedro Ugarte (AFP)

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