SQUEEZED – Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility

That’s the title of a new research report from Oxfam and the Institute for Development Studies. It chronicles the effects, five years on, of increased food prices and food price volatility upon poor people in low and middle income countries with ‘severe’ and ‘moderate levels’ of undernourishment in10 countries – from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh, Guatemala to Vietnam.

As well as affecting what and how much people eat, increasing and more volatile food prices are affecting social relation with drops in time for social care as more family members are forced to work to compensate for rising food prices and inflation. They are leading people to leave farming as well as undermining social relations such as people’s ability to mark life events such as births, marriages and death with food sharing, their willingness and ability to cooperate, and maintain informal systems of social protection.

With future food price spike likely, the report calls for preparation to deal with them now. With dozens of researchers in 10 countries involved – the other six are Bolivia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan and Zambia – they paint a nuanced and harrowing picture of the reality of the deep social, cultural as well as physiological and psychological impact of what are too often treated as macro statistics.

Credit:Irina Werning Copyright: Oxfam/Irina Werning

Dodo Khan Jamali (28) in his shop in Bahwalpur village, Sindh province

“The price I get from things from the market are more but I sell them for more so I get a profit. My customers are struggling, there is a lot of poverty here. Almost all the items have gone up and I see people buying less, customers can afford to buy smaller amounts.”

“Prices are more now, I buy a kilo of onions in the market for 50 rupees and sell them for 55 but last year they were 18 rupees for a kilo.”

“The price of potatoes is not very different, they are cheap – even at the highest price they are 20 rupees a kilo. But oil is different, people that used to buy a kilo now half or a quarter. Often the customer just buys what they need for just one meal for 10 rupees.”

 

Pat Westoff on biofuels and food prices, soya trade, commodity speculation, US farm profit and land values

If there are high petroleum prices then the price of oil will determine the price of food. But if oil prices stay at current levels or drop then only policy measures will keep up biofuel production. That is one conclusion from the work of Pat Westhoff and his colleagues at the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI), at the University of Missouri.

The institute models what is happening in US agriculture and the likely effects of different policy options and production scenarios. This work provides a direct input to the US Congress to aid in the decision making there. They do not make recommendations but only say would happen based on different scenarios.

They recently published their latest US Baseline Briefing Book of Projections for Agricultural and Biofuel Markets. The models they use took years to develop and that for the baseline study has some 2050 equations and is run 50 times. I talked to Pat about trends in biofuels, their impact on food prices, as well as trends in soya trade and farm profitability in the US and you can listen to the interview here.

Soil structure, weeds in GM crops, building diversity, recycling waste and more

I’m in Columbia, Missouri visiting various folk at the University here. Today, I was out at the Bradford farm, one of the University farms, talking to Tim Reinbott. You can hear him here talking about how the soil structure has gone down, the emergence of weeds in the GM crops after 10 easy years, increasing diversity above ground and use of cover crops to improve soils, reduce weeds and fertiliser use. The site also boasts a two movable greenhouse like structures (rainout shelters) to research crop response to drought stress. He’s also pioneered composting waste from the university catering to fertilise the vegetables they grow for the canteens and using their used cooking oil for biodiesel to fuel the work. He also repeated work he’d read about in Science that many scientist were sceptical of showing that the more diversity you have the more biomass can get, with results that match or surpass that produced by fertilised monocultures.

Below: Tim (left) talking to David Braun. Soil profiles – 60 years in prairie grass and 60 years continuous cropping – guess which is which – listen to the clip, and rainout shelter.

Europe’s green revolution and others since

Is history any use in helping us understand what to do to help poor and peasant farmers? The answer is a resounding yes according to Jonathan Harwood.  He’s just published a fascinating book called Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since – the rise and fall of peasant-friendly plant breeding,*

He reviews the experience in Europe in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, contrasting the larger, commercial farmer-focused breeding in N Germany with the peasant-friendly breeding in S Germany that led to Europe’s Green Revolution, decades before the more familiar one which is the subject of the second part of the book.

He looks at the lessons from that, sees if any were learnt subsequently and compares and contrasts post Second World War Green Revolution with the historical. Learning some lessons is especially important given talk of a second Green Revolution today. Yet the evidence of history suggests lessons will not learned. Too often it is a case of re-inventing wheels and repeating past mistakes.

For him, now emeritus professor of the history of science and technology at the University of Manchester, “What the past offers is not a recipe but a list of issues to watch out for, a wider range of options from which to choose, a set of tools for thinking.”

One of the main conclusions he draws, “is that state funded research and development not only can be successful but is probably essential”. It is a great shame the publishers have priced it so high and not produced it in paperback at a price that would mean it would be much more widely read.

* Routledge, Abingdon, 2012, £90, hardback

ISBN: 978-0-415-59868-7; e-book ISBN: 978-0-203-11804-7

Fire in the blood – seeds in the ground

Forget the Oscars. Go and see – if you can find it – Fire in the Blood – a new film released this weekend in the UK that was an official selection for the Sundance Film festival.

It is not about food but it holds lessons for our food future. The makers say the film is “An intricate tale of ‘medicine, monopoly and malice’” that ,”tells the story of how Western pharmaceutical companies and governments aggressively blocked access to low-cost AIDS drugs for the countries of Africa and the global south in the years after 1996 – causing ten million or more unnecessary deaths -  and the improbable group of people who decided to fight back.”

When you do see it, think about how this experience of lack of access, rules on patents and corporate power interact. This brand based, pharma model for research and development, controlling access and keeping prices high is the kind of model being pushed deeper and deeper into the base of the food system.

This is happening through the way R&D on seeds is developing in corporate hands and the extension of patent and plant variety protection rules. These latter were initially spread through the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the World Trade Organisation, which are briefly covered towards the end of the film, as their biggest impact to date has been on access to medicines. Since TRIPS was established, the rules are being strengthened via many bilateral trade deals and investment treaties. There’s a lot more detail about this in The Future Control of Food – A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security.

The restrictions on access are reinforced by technology-agreement-protected genetically engineered, and now even normally breed, seeds in some places, which are being developed, promoted and controlled by a similar few companies. The trend is at its most extreme in the USA where “seed prices have risen dramatically in those crops in which patented GE varieties are now predominant, such as corn, soybean and cotton”, according to a recent report, “Seed giants vs U.S. farmers”

But this trend it is not just about seeds, or medicines, but knowledge and anything that comes under the expanding intellectual property regime. For farming, the original dispersed, open access system of innovation, the pharma model not is not appropriate, for a fair and sustainable food future. We should learn some lessons from medicine and not go down that route. Indeed, a new model is needed for Pharma too.

Risk, small farmers and total resource management – insights from Dr Bob Orskov

I was up in Aberdeen in early February giving a lecture for the Centre for Sustainable International Development. While there, I met a remarkable man  – Bob Orskov – a researcher who’s worked with small farmers around the world for decades.

A lifelong specialist on livestock, he argues strongly for the need to look at farming holistically if you are to help small farmers. Now in his late 70s, he still travels extensively to promote sustainable, resource efficient farming systems, in which small farmers are key to such total resource management. He spent most of his career at the Rowett Research Institute and now has a small office in in the James Hutton Institute Aberdeen, formerly known as the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute

A farmer’s son from Denmark, he told me how he came to be a researcher and about the key lessons from his long career in a short interview, which you can hear here.

He urges people in so called ‘developing’ countries to be very critical when thinking about copying approaches from the industrialised countries.

Bob stresses the need to listen to small farmers, recognise that risk is the key factor that affects their decisions, and that they look at their farming operations as a whole – as plant breeders need to do, for example in looking at what is considered the by-product, the quantity and nutrient content of straw, for example, as well as the main product, the grain. One reason is because in resource efficient, mixed farming system usually practised by small farmers in developing countries the animals get the by-product.

He also thinks change is needed both in the reward system for researchers, so those doing practically focussed work not published in the prestigious international journals is better rewarded, but also institutionally with underpinned prices and a suitable market infrastructure that supports resource efficient sun, water and wind driven multiculture farming.

The Orskov Foundation promotes sustainable development for the poorest rural communities in the world by integrating of agricultural education with community projects.

WHO’s new guidance on dietary salt and potassium cuts salt intake

Just got the following from WHO:

Adults should consume less than 2,000 mg of sodium, or 5 grams of salt, and at least 3,510 mg of potassium per day, according to new guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). A person with either elevated sodium levels and low potassium levels could be at risk of raised blood pressure which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.  
 
Sodium is found naturally in a variety of foods, including milk and cream (approximately 50 mg of sodium per 100 g) and eggs (approximately 80 mg/100 g). It is also found, in much higher amounts, in processed foods, such as bread (approximately 250 mg/100 g), processed meats like bacon (approximately 1,500 mg/100 g), snack foods such as pretzels, cheese puffs and popcorn (approximately 1,500 mg/100 g), as well as in condiments such as soy sauce (approximately 7,000 mg/100 g), and bouillon or stock cubes (approximately 20,000 mg/100 g).
 
Potassium-rich foods include: beans and peas (approximately 1,300 mg of potassium per 100 g), nuts (approximately 600 mg/100 g), vegetables such as spinach, cabbage and parsley (approximately 550 mg/100 g) and fruits such as bananas, papayas and dates (approximately 300 mg/100 g). Processing reduces the amount of potassium in many food products.
 
Currently, most people consume too much sodium and not enough potassium.
 
“Elevated blood pressure is a major risk for heart disease and stroke – the number one cause of death and disability globally,” says Dr Francesco Branca, Director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development. “These guidelines also make recommendations for children over the age of 2.  This is critical because children with elevated blood pressure often become adults with elevated blood pressure.”
 
The guidelines are an important tool for public health experts and policymakers as they work in their specific country situations to address noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. Public health measures to reduce sodium and increase potassium consumption and thereby decrease the population’s risk of high blood pressure and heart disease can include food and product labelling, consumer education, updating national dietary guidelines, and negotiating with food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt in processed foods.
 
WHO is also updating guidelines on the intake of fats and sugars associated to reduced risk of obesity and noncommunicable diseases.

WHO Guidelines: Sodium intake for adults and children http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/guidelines/sodium_intake
 
WHO Guidelines: Potassium intake for adults and children http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/guidelines/potassium_intake