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Global Food Crisis:
What it is and what CIMMYT is doing
The era of cheap food is over!
World food prices have skyrocketed and maize and wheat are in short supply. People have taken to the streets to protest tortilla prices in Mexico and the price of bread in Egypt; another dozen countries around the world have suffered similar incidents. Worst of all, poor maize and wheat consumers, who spend generally more than half their meager incomes on food, can now afford less to eat. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said that food inflation could push at least 100 million people into poverty, wiping out all the gains the poorest billion have made during almost a decade of economic growth.
How did this occur?
The demand for maize and wheat has risen dramatically and quickly. As they have become more prosperous, people in China and India are eating more meat, which requires feed grain to produce. This had been predicted by economists for years, but consumers and governments were lulled to complacency by a quarter century of cheap, subsidized food. New biofuel programs in developed countries guzzle maize, instead of gasoline. Bad weather in Australia, Canada, China, and parts of Europe cut global supplies, and the world’s maize and wheat grain reserves hit a historic low.
In the long run, cereal prices will fluctuate in response to supply, demand, and other factors, and may even drop again, but the issue is how to buffer the poor, who are most vulnerable, against volatile markets. Policy and food aid will play a role, but there is a need for long-term investments in agriculture to ensure stable food security, nutrition, and development, thus helping to eradicate the root causes of poverty, while protecting the environment.
How CIMMYT helps
Crop improvement and seed systems. CIMMYT is developing new strains of wheat and maize that will allow developing-world farmers to increase yields, even in drought years, and to reduce pest losses. The center’s improved cereal germplasm and production technologies will help to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, especially by providing more and affordable food, by improving poor farmers' income through the sale of crop surpluses, and by providing more nutritious maize and wheat varieties. Finally, maize and wheat farmers in many parts of the developing world lack access to affordable, quality seed of improved varieties. CIMMYT works with policy makers and small- and medium-scale seed enterprises to promote healthy, competitive seed markets.
Crop management. Simple conservation agriculture practices, like reducing tillage, keeping substantial crop residues on the soil, and rotating crops, help improve system productivity while cutting production costs, excessive use of water and fertilizer, and negative environmental effects. CIMMYT is testing and promoting such practices with millions of farmers in Africa , Asia , and Latin America. Use of advanced technology like infrared sensors to target fertilizer use in irrigated wheat systems is improving productivity, while reducing nitrate run-off into aquifers and the release of greenhouse gases.
Efficient value chains. Economic analyses and market studies by CIMMYT provide guidance for decision makers attempting to form policies in support of undistorted markets and more productive, sustainable agriculture. CIMMYT works with colleagues in other international centers to stem the tide of decades-long reductions in government and donor support for research to increase food crop yields in ways that conserve natural resources and don’t harm the environment (read the letter to World Bank President Robert Zoellick from the Directors General of CIMMYT and the International Rice Research Institute)
Broad, innovative partnerships provide access to cutting-edge farm technology. CIMMYT applies science to benefit smallholder farmers in maize and wheat cropping systems in the developing world. To accomplish this, the center works impartially and apolitically with national research programs and ministries of agriculture, universities, private companies, non-government organizations, and farmer associations in developing countries, as well as advanced research institutes and the private sector in industrialized nations.
Public statements on the food supply crisis
"We need not only short-term emergency measures to meet urgent critical needs and avert starvation in many regions across the world, but also a significant increase in long-term productivity in food grain production."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon at a recent meeting of key international figures
This is life and death. This is hunger. It's right to the core of the challenge. They have to step up, not food aid, it's not shipping expensive food. It's helping small holder farmers grow the food to help them earn an income and to stay alive.
Jeffrey Sachs, Special UN Adviser
"Agriculture stopped being sexy, it was all about unglamorous logistics. The focus was more on delivering health and education services. That has to change."
Amy Barry, Oxfam
Officials from various aid agencies believe that the international community should also think about boosting long-term investment to improve agriculture productivity, on top of extending food aid to developing countries. "These investments will reap high returns including peace and stability," said Frank Orzechowski of the Catholic Relief Services.
A recent report from Reuters
“But as important (as food aid) are steps that might ease the dangerous toll that soaring food and fuel prices are taking on the most fragile nations—greater investment to support farm sectors, to improve yields, and to lower trade barriers.”
Jeffrey Borns, director of the largest
U.S. food aid program, at the
U.S. government's annual conference on global food aid
"With greater investment in agriculture and rural development, the world's 400 million smallholders could mobilize their under-utilized potential, not only to improve their own nutrition and incomes but to enhance national food security and overall economic growth."
Lennart Båge, President, the International
Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD),
at the first Global Agro-Industries Forum
“If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.”
Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate and
former CIMMYT wheat breeder
“In the short run, humanitarian aid, social-protection programmes and trade policies will determine how well the world copes with these problems. But in the medium term the question is different: where does the world get more food from? ….Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world's 450 million smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres. There are three reasons why this would be desirable. First, it would reduce poverty: three-quarters of those making do on $1 a day live in the countryside and depend on the health of smallholder farming. Next, it might help the environment: those smallholders manage a disproportionate share of the world's water and vegetation cover, so raising their productivity on existing land would be environmentally friendlier than cutting down the rainforest. And it should be efficient: in terms of returns on investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in.”
The Economist, 17 April 2008 print edition
