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World Food Day is Friday, Oct. 16, 2009.

One in six people go to bed hungry each night, not sure how to find food to stay alive. Ending hunger is a global priority. It’s the best course of action that’s under debate.

A woman and a child suffering from Acute Water Diarrhea in the Wanleweyn district, southern Somalia, April 5, 2009. Photograph: Abdurashid Abikar/AFP/Getty Images via The ObserverThe Obama administration is on this course of action:

• Three weeks ago in New York at the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informally announced that fighting hunger was the chief goal of the Obama administration’s foreign policy with a focus on farmers with small holdings.

• In his speech to the UNGA, President Obama declared that the US would come to the MDG summit in 2010 with an agreed global plan of action.

• At the G-8 summit at L’Aquila in Italy, the member nations pledged $20 billion to work towards global food security.

• In Pittsburgh, the G-20 decided that the L’Aquila money would go through a multi-dollar trust fund at the World Bank, which will disburse money to small holder farmers.

USDA secretary Tom Vilsack recently launched the National Institute of Food (NIFA), saying the institute would focus on “global food security and hunger, climate change, sustainable energy, childhood obesity and food safety” – announced that NIFA will be headed by Roger Beachy, a plant scientist. via Kaiser Foundation

Food Supply and Terrorism

One cannot separate international politics and the food supply. In Somalia, US restrictions affect promised food aid, because the Islamist hardline group al-Shabab occupies most of southern Somalia and steals the food. They have no interest in feeding the starving with Western donations.

WFP executive director Josette SheeranLast week’s Pakistani Taliban terrorist attack on World Food Programme (WFP) offices in Islamabad killed five people and caused a termporary shutdown of WFP offices in Pakistan. WFP executive director Josette Sheeran ruled out the option of withdrawing from Pakistan in the wake of the attack, adding that ‘this is not contemplated.’

‘We will, as we increase our security management, bring in some international experts to support the effort to enhance security,’ she added. via Dawn.com

Many activists believe that government talk is cheap and the reality very different, in terms of food aid. Keeping things simple, for many reasons, food aid is not delivered as promised. As citizens, reading global G-20 resolutions cannot lull us into thinking that the problem of global food supply is under control.

On October 11, the Observer wrote: Millions will starve as rich nations cut food aid funding, warns UN.

Food riots in more than 20 countries last year persuaded rich countries to give a record $5bn to the WFP to help avert a global food crisis brought on by record oil prices and the growth of biofuel crops. But new data seen by the Observer show that food aid is now at its lowest in 20 years. Countries have offered only $2.7bn in the first 10 months of 2009.

The US, by far the world’s biggest contributor to food aid, has so far pledged $800m less than in 2008; Saudi Arabia has paid only $10m in 2009 compared with $500m in 2008; and the EU has given $130m less. Britain’s promise of $69m (£43.5m) this year is nearly $100m (£63m) less than 2008, and, if nothing more is given, will be its lowest contribution since 2001.

President Obama laments that Africa hasn’t seen the “Green Revolution” the world brought to India. In fact, today India ranks 94th in the Global Hunger index of 119 countries. Malnutrition accounts for nearly 50% of child deaths in India.

One-third of adults in India are reported to have a BMI of 18.5 or less. Globally, a BMI of 18.5 is considered to be underweight and verging on anorexia.

It’s true that India’s “Green Revolution” resulted in a record grain output of 131 million tons in 1978-79 and established India as one of the world’s biggest agricultural producers. Yet starvation and malnutrition are rampant, severe problems in India.

Thirty years later, the India’s Punjab region continues to grow far more whaeat and rice for India than any other region. But problems threaten collapse of food productivity:

• the Punjab is running out of groundwater

• farmers must buy three times as much fertilizer as they did 30 eyars ago to grown the same amount of crops.

• crops have become pesticide resistant

The Punjab State Council for Science and Technology says that agriculture “has become unsustainable and nonprofitable. via NPR

Africa needs GM modified food, says Sir David King, who contradicts Prince Charles support for organic agriculture as a primary solution in developing countries. via Independent UK

Philanthropy, Business & Agriculture

Two of our A of C Smarty Pants philanthropists, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Howard Buffett are engaged in the global fight to improve agricultural production around the world. With nearly unchallenged good intentions, Gates and Buffett seek to fund and collaborate the best brains on the planet in what might be considered a losing battle of food supply and food security.

Last month, The Nation featured a critical piece on the Gates group, written by Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck, all of Food First.

Called Ending Africa’s Hunger, the writers interviewed key staffers with the Gates Foundation, and produced a pleasantly critical analysis of the Gates (and also Fockefeller Foundation) policies regarding agricultural development in Africa.

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, “If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies.” This is feedback that can’t so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.

Bottom line, the arguments about the next wave of the Green Revolution revolve around big business, especially Monsanto and the desire of big American foundations like the Gates Foundation and Howard Buffett’s Foundation to revolutionize agriculture in Africa.

Frankly, we support both organizations but the role of Monsanto in global food production is a controversial one, and we’re not qualified to discuss it.

Read A of C Cultural Creative Howard Buffett Is on the Ground in Africa.

A recent food aid project started by the Gates and Howard Buffett foundations collects grain from African farms but pays the World Food Programme staff to do it. Critics argue that the money should go directly to farmers, developing their entrepreneurial business skills.

Yet a late September 2009 announcement out of the WFP says that the program is working well in the first year. The Gates and Buffett initiative focuses on 42,000 small farmers, previously unable to meet the requirements of WFP tenders.

Faso Jigi, a federation of farmers’ associations in Mali, scored a first this year. Its 2,500 members were finally able to participate and win a tender to sell 600 metric tons (MT) of cereals to WFP.”This year the sale was quick, they paid us promptly and we made a good profit. If they do the same after the next harvest it will be a good thing,” said 60-year-old Mamadou Traoré, a longtime member of Faso Jigi. via ReliefWeb

This valid fundamental argument about first-world “paternalism” must also be leveraged against catastrophic failure to get results in Africa.

Enlightened people on every continent agree that the African infrastructure of corruption and self-serving governments, along with endless tribal and social infrastructure challenges, are also part of Africa’s development problem.

In a shaken global economy, neither governments nor foundations are interested in aid with no results. When terrorist groups are determined to starve people, stealing food supplies and bombing UN food agencies, the problem is far more complicated than first world imperialism.

Like it or not, the entire aid community has become much more results-focused. The problems that have followed the “Green Revolution” in India remind us that depleting both soil and water supply can derail the best laid strategies — nobel or strictly commercial.

The Gambian-run National Women Farmers’ Association has successfully supported 48,000 women working in co-operative village groups since the 1990’s, increasing their wealth and food security to cope with and overcome a lack of national infrastructure, food dumping from countries with subsidised agriculture and adverse global financial and climate changes. via Environment Times UKMy own reading on this topic is limited, but women haven’t appeared much in my reading. And yet, women farmers produce 70 percent of the food supply. Not intending to start a row, when I see photos of the big aid organizations, they’re photographed with African men.

Perhaps the learnings of Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen microlending should be applied to African farming. Grameen lends almost exclusively to women, after disastrous results with men. This reality is factual and not our opinion. Dr. Yunus is committed to women, as the gender to move societies forward in underdeveloped countries.

In Kenya on Aug. 5, Secretary of State Clinton said: “The social, political, and economic marginalization of women across Africa has left a void in this continent that undermines progress and prosperity every day.”

She said, “We know across Africa women are doing the work of a whole continent — gathering firewood, hauling water, washing clothes, preparing meals, raising children, in the fields planting and harvesting, and when given the opportunity of economic empowerment, transforming communities and local economies.”

Reality is that it appears that women are very absent from the strategic discussions about the development of farming in Africa. If so, the experience and views of Dr. Yunus must be considered when considering African agricultural development.

Unfortuntely, patriarchal attitudes and practices must be considered as part of the problem in why Africa hasn’t developed its agricultural sector.

Approaching World Food Day this Friday, we’re not on the road to a permanent, effective solution to feeding the one in six malnourished people in the world. I didn’t even write about the mind-boggling challenge of environment and food security.

“I am more discouraged than I was when I started. The problems are so huge,” says Howard Buffett.

Simply stated, there’s no reason to be hopeful about a future solution, unless …

I wear always optimistic, rose-colored glasses, but some days, it’s important to take them off. Global food supply is one of those topics. Anne