http://www.irinnews.org/irin-fp.aspxUpdated everydayen-gbMon, 09 Jun 2008 18:44:58 GMTPORT LOUIS Monday, June 09, 2008 (IRIN) - Last year, Camille Liu's* future was looking good. He had met a woman - "a perfect match" – while working in Mozambique as an electrician. They fell in love, decided to move to his home country – Mauritius, get married and have children. PORT LOUIS Monday, June 09, 2008 (IRIN) - Last year, Camille Liu's * future was looking good. He had met a woman - "a perfect match" – while working in Mozambique as an electrician. They fell in love, decided to move to his home country – Mauritius, get married and have children.

But when Anna Magurra * arrived on the tropical Indian Ocean island, ready to accept her fiancé's proposal, a few bureaucratic issues stood in the way of their marriage - one of them was an HIV test.

Anne's test results came back positive. "I was shocked, devastated, incredibly sad and terrified," Liu related.

A few days later officials told them they would not be allowed to marry and that Anne had to leave the country within days.

According to Mauritian law, they could not get married as all foreigners who want to get married to Mauritians must test for HIV and if they are HIV positive, they are deported to their countries of origin.

Earlier this year, however, the government amended the legislation, and the couple can now get married.

Fighting to get married

Sitting in a café in the capital, Port Louis, Liu, a Mauritian-Chinese in his mid-30s looks happy and relaxed for a man about to get married this week.

"After the big shock I got myself together," he told IRIN/PlusNews. "I promised her I would fight and do everything to marry her and help her to stay with me in Mauritius."

Liu approached Dhiren Moher, an AIDS activist, and one of the few people in the country who have publicly disclosed their HIV positive status. Moher then launched a campaign to get the government to change its discriminatory policies.

But the fight is not over yet. Mauritius still has laws which prohibit HIV-positive foreigners from getting a work permit, and Moher is now calling for the state to change this law.

Meanwhile, Camille and Anna will marry this week in a small ceremony, attended by their closest family members, who have been supportive of the couple's battle.

"I loved her so much I would do anything for her. I am happy today," he added.

Neighbours and other people do not know about their situation. Stigma and discrimination are widespread in the country, and very few people are open about their status.

"We want to keep this secret so that our life will be a little bit easier," Camille said.

The Indian Ocean island nation has an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 1.8 percent, but the country's rising drug problem puts many more people at risk.

Drug abuse accounts for 92 percent of new HIV infections in Mauritius, up from just 14 percent in 2002.

"Such laws as the one forbidding [people] to marry HIV-positive foreigners are not helping to solve the AIDS problem at all," said Nicolas Ritter, an activist with local AIDS activist group PILS (Prevention, Intervention, Lutte contre le SIDA).

"This law discriminated people and deprive them of their most basic rights," Ritter, who is also one of the first people in Mauritius to publicly disclose his status, told IRIN/PlusNews. "One should rather concentrate on fighting the drug problem and help people with HIV and AIDS."

* Not their real names.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78655CAPE TOWN Thursday, June 05, 2008 (IRIN) - "Multiple, concurrent partnerships" has become the latest catchphrase in the HIV/AIDS lexicon. It refers to the practice of having more than one sexual partner at the same time, which experts say is a key driver of Southern Africa's devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic. CAPE TOWN Thursday, June 05, 2008 (IRIN) - "Multiple, concurrent partnerships" has become the latest catchphrase in the HIV/AIDS lexicon. It refers to the practice of having more than one sexual partner at the same time, which experts say is a key driver of Southern Africa's devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In a South African population-based survey in 2005, 40 percent of men and 25 percent of women aged between 15 and 24 reported having concurrent partners. To try and understand why, the Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication, a multimedia health promotion project, conducted research to find out how South Africans actually view these relationships.

Prof Sue Goldstein, a researcher at Soul City, presented the findings from focus groups of men and women across the country to delegates at the 4th Public Health Association of South Africa conference in Cape Town this week.

"Multiple, concurrent partnerships appear to be the accepted norm in many South African communities," she said. The attitudes and beliefs that perpetuated this norm were "astonishingly similar" across rural and urban divides, and even to those found in similar studies in other countries of the region.

A significant other

Both men and women talked of a primary, long-term relationship based on love, and of secondary relationships that fulfilled other needs. In the case of women the need was often financial, but sometimes it was sexual.

"You know if someone is boring in the bedroom, and you know when you have met someone who hits the spot," said one woman who participated in a focus group in rural KwaZulu-Natal Province. "You carry on with the other one if he gives you other things, but you know that he just doesn't do it for you sexually."

The men blamed their wandering eyes on regular partners letting their looks go, and being attracted to younger, "fresher" women who were less likely to challenge their authority. They tended to trust that their primary partners were faithful and didn't use condoms with them, even if they sometimes had unprotected sex with other women.

The women often viewed a partner's infidelity as a "natural" and unavoidable cause of men's uncontrollable sexual desires, and cultural expectations that they should have more than one partner. Some ignored infidelity because they did not want to break up their families; others took lovers of their own.

"I do my own thing and 'phone my "makhwapheni" [local term for someone who is hidden - a boyfriend] and laugh; then I won't worry about [her husband's]late-coming," said a woman in the Free State.

Many of the men spoke of their sexual desires being fuelled by alcohol, which also made them less likely to practice safe sex. Peer pressure was another major reason men gave for having multiple partners: "If I don't have sex then my friends will laugh at me. In that way, I will try to prove a point and get involved with more than one," said a man in the rural northern Limpopo Province.

The urge

Both genders described sex as a vital component of their relationships and their lives generally, with some even viewing it as essential for good health. Despite this, men as well as women had great difficulty communicating with their partners about sex.

Most of the focus group participants had a good knowledge and understanding of HIV and AIDS, but this did not prevent them from having a fatalistic attitude to the likelihood of becoming infected. "They say even if you do not ever get AIDS, the fact is, you are still going to die; we are all going to die one day," said a teenage girl in the Free State.

Goldstein concluded that risky sexual practices were not related to levels of knowledge, but to the level of control individuals have over their sexuality.

As one woman put it: "Even if you are faithful to your husband, you cannot guarantee that you will not be infected because you don't know what your husband does, and he could be infected during his outings. All you could do is to pray, and trust that God will protect you because he is the doctor of all diseases."

Soul City aims to incorporate the findings into a new five-year HIV prevention campaign.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78602ROME Thursday, June 05, 2008 (IRIN) - A one-size-fits-all approach to the world's food crisis will not work; responses need to be tailored to fit country-specific needs, a senior UN official at the global food summit in Rome told IRIN on Thursday.ROME Thursday, June 05, 2008 (IRIN) - A one-size-fits-all approach to the world's food crisis will not work; responses need to be tailored to fit country-specific needs, a senior UN official at the global food summit in Rome told IRIN on Thursday.

A new UN task force on the food crisis is analysing the situation in at least 45 affected countries to help develop action plans to meet urgent and long-term needs, said John Holmes, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

Holmes, who is also the task force coordinator, said almost every country in the world had been affected by soaring food prices and would require a response. Food prices are at their highest level since the 1970s and have sparked unrest in at least 17 grain importing countries, most of them in Africa.

The need to formulate country-specific responses, including safety nets in the form of food, cash, vouchers or targeted feeding programmes, has been highlighted by several studies on the impact of the crisis on households.

Simulated studies by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) found that urban consumers, who usually do not produce food, are likely to be hit hardest, as would rural households in countries where land was not equitably distributed.

"The point is that net buyers - be it in urban or rural areas - are the worst affected," noted Henk-Jan Brinkman, chief of food security policy and markets at the World Food Programme (WFP).

"Besides, the scale of the crisis has varied according to the value of the dollar in each country," said Benjamin Davis, a senior FAO economist who did one of the FAO studies.

Cash/vouchers in urban areas

In the past, pushing general food aid or cash voucher programmes in urban areas would have been a no-no for WFP, which handles the bulk of the UN safety net programmes, because of the myriad problems in accurately targeting beneficiaries. But earlier this month it began a cash voucher distribution programme for 200,000 Burmese urban dwellers affected by Cyclone Nargis.

"It is part of our strategic plan to expand and increase cash voucher programmes, which will be up before our executive board next week," said WFP's Brinkman. "Cash vouchers work in an urban situation where markets are functioning, but cash vouchers will not become the main focus of our assistance.

"The kind of response, whether in the form of food, cash or vouchers, will be determined by [domestic] conditions, as markets might not be functioning in urban areas in all countries."

The taxpayers' response to cash-based safety nets can also vary. Davis pointed out that there are countries, particularly in Latin America, which do not favour cash transfers, "as taxpayers feel the money will probably be wasted, maybe on drink, and they prefer to hand out food".

Cash and vouchers are the preferred immediate safety net options in countries where markets and banking systems are operating reasonably well. "There is a shift away from food aid because of the problem of creating dependency," said Holmes.

There is also little spare food available. WFP has largely been dependent on food surpluses from the developed countries, such as the US and the European Union, but has had to change its approach to the cash-versus-food-aid debate "pretty radically", as "no one has any surpluses to donate anymore - we are increasingly getting cash," Holmes noted.

WFP is already present in 78 food-insecure countries. "We are looking at all of our operations and seeing where - with the help of our NGO partners - we can scale up activity, especially safety nets, to respond to the food crisis," said WFP spokesman Martin Pennar. "Clearly, each country is different, and our response must be tailored according to the specific needs and circumstances of every country."

Capacity problems

A World Bank survey found that not all countries have the same capacity to either scale up or put new safety net programmes in place. The study split countries into four categories in terms of their capacity to spend more money on safety nets:



those in weak financial health, with poor capacity to manage shocks brought on by the need to import more food, e.g. Burundi, Eritrea, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica and Nepal
those in somewhat stronger financial health, e.g. Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Honduras; or those where the situation was compounded by political crisis, e.g. Kenya and Pakistan
those with weak fiscal capacity to take on additional spending, even if thought a bit more financially sound, e.g. Mongolia and Zambia
those who have the capacity and the money to scale up, such as Indonesia, Mexico and Tunisia.


Talks with major financial institutions and donors are underway to "possibly provide grants" to countries unable to afford additional spending on food policy and importing food, said Holmes.

All countries are being encouraged to draw up a national action plan with the help of civil society and UN agencies, he added. These efforts will have to be monitored and coordinated in the long term.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78603ROME Wednesday, June 04, 2008 (IRIN) - Biofuel is in the dock at the global food summit in Rome this week, with countries divided over whether it is the villain behind food insecurity, or the cheap energy of the future. ROME Wednesday, June 04, 2008 (IRIN) - Biofuel is in the dock at the global food summit in Rome this week, with counties divided over whether it is the villain behind food insecurity, or the cheap energy of the future.

At issue is the impact of grain-based biofuels on food prices - now at their highest levels since the 1970s - and a related wrangle over bioenergy subsidies. But there is also, increasingly, a rethink of how "green", or eco-friendly, biofuel really is.

"There is no agreement on the impact of grain-based biofuel on food prices," Alexander Müller, Assistant Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IRIN. Various studies and think-tanks have come up with estimates of the impact of biofuel on food prices that range from 10 percent to 60 percent.

Neither is there consensus on government handouts to farmers and industry, or the long-term impact of biofuel. "It is like the Kyoto Protocol [on global warming] - you cannot expect agreement within three days," said Luka Alinovi, a senior FAO food security advisor.

The simmering debate was brought to the boil by Jacques Diouf, the head of FAO, who trashed subsidies for diverting cereal production away from food and into fuel in his opening remarks at the summit on Tuesday.

The authoritative International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has estimated that bioenergy accounts for 30 percent of the recent food price inflation. A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded that biofuels were responsible for a 60 percent increase in the consumption of cereals and edible oils between 2005 and 2007.

Ed Schafer, the US secretary for agriculture, told journalists the US administration - a heavy provider of subsidies - believed biofuels accounted for just three percent of food inflation, and should not be a focus of the conference.

Good ethanol vs bad ethanol

Brazil, one of the world's largest producers of biofuel, was eager to differentiate between its sugarcane-based ethanol and the grain-derived fuels produced in the US and some OECD countries.

"Sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil is not a threat to the Amazon [River basin], it does not take land out of food production, nor does it take food off the tables ... There is good ethanol and bad ethanol," Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, told the summit.

"Corn ethanol can only compete with sugarcane ethanol when it is shot up with subsidies and shielded behind tariff barriers," a remark that evoked a strong response from the US.

Brazil, Schafer hit back, had provided support to the biofuel sector for decades, even encouraging state-owned buses to run on ethanol. "We have only just begun to walk down that path."

Rocketing fossil-based fuel prices and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have led many countries to pursue ethanol production. But is biofuel the answer? And is it really green?

The maize ethanol produced in the US may cut greenhouse emissions by 10 to 30 percent, compared to petroleum; but ethanol produced from sugarcane or cellulose could slash environment-damaging gases by 90 percent or even more, according to an IFPRI study.

Besides, there is "mounting evidence that biofuel mandates are actually accelerating climate change by driving the expansion of agriculture into critical habitats, such as forests and wetlands," said a briefing paper released at the summit by Oxfam, the UK-based development agency.

John Holmes, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told journalists that the answer perhaps lay in the development of second-generation biofuels, produced from the residual non-food parts of crops, such as stems, leaves and husks, and also from biowaste like wood chips, skins and pulp.

"The debate around biofuels is an evolving one; a few years ago, biofuel was hailed as the best thing that could have happened," said Alinovi. "We can still produce ethanol without comprising food security and cropland."

Müller was hopeful that a consensus would be reached at the summit - an anticipation echoed by the US delegation. Schafer told journalists on Wednesday that there could be agreement on "acceptable language" in biofuel discussions.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78576ROME Tuesday, June 03, 2008 (IRIN) - At least seven countries - almost all in Africa - are rated as highly vulnerable to rising food costs, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).ROME Tuesday, June 03, 2008 (IRIN) - At least seven countries - almost all in Africa - are rated as highly vulnerable to rising food costs, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Gambia, Liberia, Mauritania, Niger, Zimbabwe, and Jordan and Moldova - which have all chalked up high levels of debt - could be forced to spend as much as two percent of their gross domestic product on importing food. Most of these countries are already struggling with chronic hunger, so soaring food costs raise the threat of political instability.

Their vulnerability was underlined on Tuesday by FAO director-general Jacques Diouf, who made an impassioned appeal to world leaders meeting in Rome, Italy, to make available US$30 billion a year to revitalise agriculture and avert future food conflicts.

Inequality

Opening a three-day summit on the global food crisis, Diouf stressed the level of inequality in a world where the food wasted in a single country could cost $100 billion. "Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?"

Financing agricultural programmes in the developed world properly "would make it possible definitely to lay to rest the spectre of conflicts over food that are looming on the horizon", Diouf said. "The structural solution to the problem of food security in the world lies in increasing production and productivity in the low-income, food-deficit countries."

But in real terms aid to agriculture fell by 58 percent from 1980 to 2005, while in 2006 subsidies worth $11 billion to $12 billion diverted 100 million tonnes of cereals from human consumption "mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuels for vehicles".

With food prices rocketing to their highest levels since the 1970s, Diouf called for "innovative and imaginative solutions", including "partnership agreements ... between countries that have financial resources, management capabilities and technologies, and countries that have land, water and human resources."

Providing support

Ali Gurkan, the head of FAO's commodity markets, policy analysis and projection service, said he hoped urgent action would be taken on several possible measures to provide support to vulnerable countries - particularly those with already high levels of chronic hunger, and which imported most of their food and fuel. These measures could include a global mechanism to, at least, contain food prices and provide food or monetary aid.

Although the FAO recognises that strengthening social protection mechanisms for the urban poor is "especially important", the problem of how to roll out targeted feeding programmes in crowded cities is a ticklish one.

How can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food "Of course, there is always the danger of food aid creating dependency, and should only be used as an emergency response. As a short-term response, farmers should also be provided with inputs, such as seed and fertiliser, to ensure production for the next season is up," said Gurkan.

Food prices in Gambia shot up by more than 50 percent within a year, said Bakary Trawally, Gambia's permanent secretary for agriculture. Rice is the staple food and the country imports most of its requirement. "But we are not looking for food aid; we want solid financial commitments of investment in our agriculture, and new technology to improve our yields - we can turn things around," he told IRIN.

Sharing the blame

The global food crisis has been triggered by a drop in production in many major grain-supplying countries, the high meat and dairy consumption in growing economies such as China and India, and shifts to biofuel crop farming. Although prices are expected to fall in 2009, they will remain high for the next decade, according to the FAO and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which supports democracy and free market principles.

A recent report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticised multilateral agencies and aid donors - including the United States - for doing little to improve food production in Africa; it also blamed African governments for failing to invest in their farmers.

Although African leaders pledged in 2003 to devote 10 percent of government spending on agriculture, most of the continent's countries - with the exception of Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, and Burkina Faso - had not reached this goal as of 2005.

The gap between the average grain yield in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with the rest of the world's developing countries, has widened over the years, with productivity hitting only 40 percent by 2006. "For example, Zambia produces about 1,800kg of maize on a hectare of land, while China produces almost three times as much on the same amount of land," said the GAO report.

Besides lack of investment, high farm taxes are among the policies that penalise production and heighten food insecurity. For example, the GAO report noted, "Tanzanian farmers must pay about 55 taxes, levies, and fees to sell their agricultural products, equivalent to 50 percent of the price the farmers receive."

jk/oa/hehttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78578DAKAR Tuesday, May 27, 2008 (IRIN) - The extent of sexual abuse by aid workers and peacekeepers is being under-estimated because mechanisms to encourage victims to speak out against their attackers and to protect them are poorly developed, the British non-governmental organisation Save the Children warns in a report released today.DAKAR Tuesday, May 27, 2008 (IRIN) - The extent of sexual abuse by aid workers and peacekeepers is being under-estimated because mechanisms to encourage victims to speak out against their attackers and to protect them are poorly developed, the British non-governmental organisation Save the Children warns in a report released today.

“For every one reported case of sexual abuse, many more are kept quiet,” said the report’s author Corinna Csaky. “Children and their carers are too frightened and powerless to speak out.”

As part of its research for the report called “No One To Turn To”, Save the Children says it conducted field work in Haiti, Cote d’Ivoire and southern Sudan in 2007. In all of those places, the organisation documented evidence that children as young as six were being abused by adults working in the international community.

The children interviewed highlighted many different types of abuse, including trading food for sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.

“My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises,” said a 15 year-old girl from Haiti whose testimony is included in the report. “They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes (US$2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said no, but some of the girls did it and got the money.”

Another teenage girl from Cote d’Ivoire is quoted in the report as saying: “We have never heard of anyone reporting the cases of abuse”.

The report says that perpetrators of sexual abuse “exist in every type of humanitarian, peace and security organisation, at every grade of staff, and among locally recruited and international staff”.

Their crimes are going unreported despite the UN and many NGOs having developed various codes of conduct, inter-agency cooperation and mechanisms to encourage the reporting of abuse, and the preparation of reams of training, information and guidance material, as well as a high-level UN conference in 2006 at which UN agencies and other international actors reaffirmed their commitment to take “vigorous action” against abuses committed by their workers.

“This issue has been well documented and lots of organisations know it happens and have procedures in place to deal with it. But if children and their carers aren’t able to speak out it’s a fundamental flaw in the system and it’s that part of the problem which is what we’re trying to focus on,” Csaky said.

People living in areas where aid is being distributed are afraid that the abuser might come back and hurt them, that aid agencies might stop helping them, or that they will be stigmatised by their family and community, Save the Children says.

Csaky said agencies should take sexual abuse as seriously as they do matters of security, by convening regular meetings of senior staff to discuss the situation and risks.

Other recommendations made in the report are for effective local complaints mechanisms to be set up, a new global watchdog to be established to monitor and evaluate the efforts of international agencies to tackle abuse, and that national child protection systems be better developed.

“The obstacle to this happening is political will. It’s about organisations wanting and actively seeking to address a problem many would rather sweep under the carpet,” she said.

“We’re asking for a new culture of transparency and openness, of new priorities among all those working in emergencies to make the welfare of children a priority.”

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78417JOHANNESBURG Friday, May 23, 2008 (IRIN) - Norman Myers, a world renowned British environmentalist and authority on biodiversity, forecast more than a decade ago that as the impact of climate change intensified, the number of people fleeing natural disasters could climb to at least 50 million by 2010. Now, as the world grapples with food shortages brought on in part by climate change, he is revising his figures upwards. JOHANNESBURG Friday, May 23, 2008 (IRIN) - Norman Myers, a world renowned British environmentalist and authority on biodiversity, forecast more than a decade ago that as the impact of climate change intensified, the number of people fleeing natural disasters could climb to at least 50 million by 2010. Now, as the world grapples with food shortages brought on in part by climate change, he is revising his figures upwards.

Estimates of the number of people likely to be displaced by natural disasters or rising sea levels vary widely, but as fiercer and bigger weather events hit the news headlines daily, the temperature of debates on providing protection to people displaced by the vagaries of nature is rising.

"Many scholars are working on this 'hot topic'," said Jean-Francois Durieux, lecturer in International Human Rights and Refugee Law at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre, but most of them are struggling to find answers on how to help the displaced.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity, tells us that as global warming melts ice and expands water, several million residents in low-lying areas could be displaced in the next few decades.

Low-lying coastal areas constitute only two percent of the total land surface of the earth, but contain 10 percent of the world’s current population. A policy paper by the UN University Institute for Environment and Human Security Section (UNU-EHS) noted that about 75 percent of all vulnerable people living in low-lying areas are in Asia.

Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, may lose up to one-fifth of its surface area if the sea level rises by one metre. "If we look at South Asia alone, the melting [glaciers would mean] tens of millions of people will have to leave their livelihoods. Where will they go? How will they impact on the host communities that receive them?" asked Achim Steiner, Executive Secretary of UNEP.

It’s happening now

Natural disasters can lead to permanent migration, as illustrated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, which struck the southern United States in 2005, said Koko Warner, head of Social Vulnerability and Environmental Migration at UNU-EHS.

The Indian Ocean tsunami displaced more than two million people, many of whom are still living in refugee camps in the region. "The UN Office of the Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery estimates that 1.5 million people lost their livelihoods in the aftermath of the tsunami, further complicating resettlement of migrants," said the UNU-EHS policy paper. Hurricane Katrina caused about 1.5 million people to be displaced temporarily, and an estimated 500,000 permanently.

The Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean threatened by rising sea-levels, has played a leading role in trying to create awareness of the issue for the past two decades. In March 2008 the UN Human Rights Council agreed to conduct a study on the effects of climate change on human rights, especially livelihoods.

Maldives hopes the findings will inform the negotiation process between industrialised and developing countries at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Kyoto Protocol) on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is a general consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming, but none on how, or by how much, to reduce them.

In 2005, 1,000 residents of Carteret atoll in the Papua New Guinea islands, described by the Guardian, a UK daily newspaper, as the "world's first refugees of global warming" had to be evacuated. The sea is slowly drowning the atoll, and the process of relocating 3,000 residents of other islands is still ongoing.

Key questions

For any country to provide protection and a home to people fleeing natural disasters, the displaced need to have legal status. And it is here that policymakers are struggling with several key questions:

- How do you determine whether a person has been displaced by environmental factors?
- How do you define a person displaced by environmental factors?
- What do you call them?
- What kind of protection can be afforded to the person – short-term or long-term?
- Do those affected have to be relocated? Why not help them adapt to their changed environment?
- Who will pay for relocation or adaptation measures? Are the industrialised countries, who have been held responsible for global warming, morally obliged to pay?

Durieux said just about everybody agreed that the current legal definition of a refugee should not be tampered with to accommodate those affected by environmental factors, and in general researchers agree that most countries will accept a new concept and a separate convention on environmental refugees.

The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee, sets out the rights of those granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations granting asylum.

A "refugee" is a person, who, "owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country," said William Spindler, spokesman for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, quoting from the 1951 convention.

There are genuine concerns that expanding the definition of a refugee could "water down the convention", said UNU-EHS’s Warner. "The term ‘refugee’ has political connotations and is frequently used by refugee lobby groups, and anti-refugee lobby groups, to apply targeted pressure on governments."

Janos Bogardi, Director of UNU-EHS, said developing a definition for various categories of people displaced by environmental factors would require a better understanding of the circumstances in which environmental factors were the "main root cause for migration".

The UNU-EHS is constructing a preliminary classification that would take into account the trigger and type of assistance available to help potential migrants cope in their own countries.

The triggers

Essentially, two kinds of displacement could potentially be caused by global warming: firstly, intensification of weather events, such as cyclones and droughts; secondly, rising sea-levels. These raise conceptual problems on defining a potential migrant forced to flee, said Durieux. Some analysts argue that migration as a result of natural disasters, such as drought, could be seen as a coping strategy rather than a trigger.

"It will be a rare occurrence that 'global warming' produces large-scale and sudden displacement across international borders. In most cases, the displacement will be gradual, spread over lengthy periods and possibly involving many 'stopovers', including within the country of origin. This would make a status determination extremely complicated."

But rising sea-levels could lead to the possible 'disappearance' of entire states. "This (if it occurs) will raise questions of 'international protection' and, indeed, new forms of statelessness, for which new solutions will have to be imagined," Durieux told IRIN.

Etienne Piguet, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, says in one of his papers: "There is agreement today that natural factors are not the sole cause of migration, and that the economic, social and political situation of the zone under threat can, depending on the case, increase or decrease the flow of migrants.

"Apart from the scientific error of oversimplifying the processes taking place, the danger here is also one of "evacuating political responsibility by overplaying the hand of nature".

However, Durieux pointed out that "Where a famine is caused by bad governance ... the existing refugee law instruments suffice to recognise the fleeing victims as refugees.

"While it can be argued that in the final analysis all 'environmentally induced' displacements are in some way man-made, where the responsibility can be attributed clearly to one failing state, or one repressive government, receiving states cannot hide behind the 'natural disaster' screen to deny asylum to the victims," he said.

But who's listening?

At present the European Union member states, which deal with the largest influx of refugees, and Australia and New Zealand, which are the first port of call for several threatened island states in their neighbourhood, are the only countries that have been proactive about the issue, said UNU-EHS’s Warner.

The European Commission is funding a two-year research project, Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios (EACH-FOR), based on case studies in 24 vulnerable countries spanning all continents and conducted by UNU-EHS.

The aim is to find answers to questions such as: who has been migrating away from situations of environmental degradation/change; where; why, and the kind of coping capacity; adaptation mechanisms already in place, and the perception of environmental degradation.

EU member states are focusing on adaptation projects in vulnerable countries as a preventative measure against an influx of refugees;Canada is funding the relocation of residents of parts of Vanuatu, another Pacific Ocean island affected by global warming.

Doctors for the Environment Australia, a branch of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE), a voluntary organisation of physicians, argued in a discussion paper that Australia and New Zealand have a "moral responsibility" to accept refugees from Pacific islands inundated by rising sea levels.

"Their combined population is relatively small - in the region of 150,000 - and some of them, from Tokelaua and Tuvalu, already have negotiated rights to enter New Zealand [unrelated to the impact of climate change]... Only the inhabitants of Kiribati (population 78,000) have no real migration options, and may seek entry into Australia or New Zealand."

But what about populations in non-island states such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Egypt, identified as some of the most vulnerable to rising sea-levels by a World Bank study, says Warner. "There will have to be regional solutions to the problems."

jk/he/oahttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78387JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, May 14, 2008 (IRIN) - Government attempts to control food supplies to ensure that their people have enough to eat are hampering efforts by the World Food Programme (WFP) to source cheap food for the hungry.JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, May 14, 2008 (IRIN) - Government attempts to control food supplies to ensure that their people have enough to eat are hampering efforts by the World Food Programme (WFP) to source cheap food for the hungry.

The UN agency has been trying to reduce costs by procuring food regionally, but its attempts to stretch donor cash have been stymied by countries struggling with record food and fuel prices. Some have imposed export bans or export tax, complicating WFP's intention to ship more than 100,000 metric tonnes (mt) of food.

WFP spokesman Martin Penner said they wanted to export 2,500mt of grain to Ghana and Niger from Burkina Faso, which has not given the go-ahead. The aid agency provides food to more than 1.3 million beneficiaries in Ghana and 1.6 million in Niger. Rising food prices have led to protests in Burkina Faso, where the government has been under pressure to respond to the crisis.

The aid agency has also had to put off three shipments of food to Afghanistan because of price controls put in place by neighbouring Pakistan, Iran and Kazakhstan. According to Penner, Pakistan has yet to agree to a WFP request, made in February, to ship 100,000mt of wheat to Afghanistan; Iran imposed a US$300,000 export tax and the aid agency has had to cancel the purchase of 3,000mt; Kazakhstan banned wheat exports in April, which led to the purchase of 5,500mt being scuppered.

It is unclear whether Pakistan's policy on wheat exports has affected WFP's shipment to Afghanistan. In April, The Daily Times, a Pakistani newspaper, quoted a government official as saying, "We are exporting wheat to Afghanistan for the last several years and it will be continued on humanitarian grounds" but "through official level".

Up to 70 percent of Afghanistan's estimated 26.6 million people are considered food-insecure by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, but high food prices have recently pushed millions more into "high risk" food-insecurity.

Escalating food and fuel prices have affected every region, but countries that are net importers of staple grains such as wheat and rice are worst affected. According to the World Bank, global food prices have shot by 83 percent since the beginning of 2008. A growing demand for meat, milk and biofuels, and droughts in grain-producing countries like Australia have affected food prices and could push 100 million people into deeper poverty, warned the bank.

The aid agency, Catholic Relief Services, said in some regions of Niger families have started eating only one meal a day; in Burkina Faso between 60 and 80 percent of the minimum salary of a civil servant - about $100 a month - is spent on food and fuel: a bag of rice costs around $35 and a month's supply of gasoline can cost close to $30.

Short-sighted

The Washington Post recently described government policies to restrict movement of staple grains as understandable, but "fatally shortsighted ... Over time, the curtailment in trade simply encourages hoarding and discourages production. The result: shrinking supplies and higher prices."

Export bans disrupt markets, on which the poor depend on heavily to survive, said Christopher Barrett, who teaches development economics at Cornell University, New York, and is the co-author of the book, Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role. "Government disruption of those markets almost always comes at a heavy humanitarian price, in addition to the economic inefficiency it causes."

Export bans are "a beggar-thy-neighbour policy that makes poor importing countries (think of Afghanistan, the Philippines) worse off by disrupting food availability and driving up prices in those countries, for only modest and short-lived price drops in the ban-imposing country," he added.

Controlling the movement of food "promotes the emergence of a parallel market, which in relatively short order almost always negates the price effects of the ban, so that the export ban ultimately just wastes both government and merchant resources and undermines the rule of law," said Barrett.

He pointed out that bans also "undermine the exporter's reliability as a supplier, which hurts them over the medium-to-long term because they have to offer lower prices in order to compensate for their compromised reliability".

The WFP is trying to work around the obstacles, "looking for alternative sources and explaining to governments the humanitarian importance of the food we are trying to obtain", said Penner. "India, which waived its ban on rice imports, is a good example of where a government took our humanitarian goals into account." Despite a ban on rice exports, India permitted the WFP to buy and ship 25,410mt of rice.

jk/he /bphttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78187JOHANNESBURG Monday, May 05, 2008 (IRIN) - Canada is the latest major donor country to break the link between overseas food aid and supporting its own farmers. JOHANNESBURG Monday, May 05, 2008 (IRIN) - Canada is the latest major donor country to break the link between overseas food aid and supporting its own farmers.

The country says it will no longer insist on sending domestically grown food to the rising number of poor countries affected by escalating food and fuel prices, but will instead provide aid agencies with cash, giving them the flexibility to source cheaper food in the region or beneficiary country.

Canada's move to "untie" its food aid by removing restrictions on where the food can be purchased leaves the United States of America, the world largest donor of food, as the only developed country with tied food aid.

"With fuel cost increases eating into food aid budgets as much as food price rises are, untying emergency food aid is more important than ever, so as to conserve increasingly scarce funds and provide a quicker response," said Christopher Barrett, who teaches development economics at Cornell University, New York, and is the co-author of the book, Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role.

Canada also announced a donation of US$230 million to food aid programmes, joining the United Kingdom, the European Union and Japan, who have also pledged significant amounts to deal with the current crisis.

"Hopefully, the US Congress [which is considering President George Bush's proposed $770 million in new aid to feed the world's hungry] will follow Canada's lead," Barrett commented.

Almost all food aid donated by the USA is tied to domestic requirements for procurement, processing and shipping. According to Barrett, it costs more than two dollars of US taxpayers' money to deliver one dollar's worth of food procured as in-kind food aid.

Feeding while building agriculture

Edward Clay, senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a UK-based think-tank, noted: "The implication [of Canada's announcement] is that the priority should be the food security of hungry people in developing countries and providing support that helps to promote local producers and markets, and also seeks value for money when funds are at a premium."

He pointed out that Canada had been providing food aid since the 1950s, almost all of it sourced in Canada. In 2005, when the global community signed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, in which rich countries committed themselves to removing restrictions on procuring aid and promoting the recipient country's agriculture and markets, Canada announced that it would untie half its food aid.

Already profiting

Barrett said the current high prices of food and fuel meant agri-businesses and shipping lines in the US were "enjoying record profits, so the defensibility of safeguarding their windfall gains from present US food aid policy is ebbing."

David Snider, a spokesman for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said the Bush administration had put forward a proposal that 25 percent of food aid dispensed by the US government be in cash to buy food for recipient countries locally or regionally.

Neither Barrett nor Clay could see Bush's proposal getting the nod from Congress. Barrett said there were subtle signs of change in Congress, but thought the prospects were better for getting pro-local and regional purchases of food aid included in the next Farm Bill, a specific law governing food aid that is updated every five years.

New money

The additional new aid proposed by Bush, which includes US$395 million for emergency food aid, has come under internal criticism, the daily Washington Post newspaper reported.

The Democrats, who voiced dissent, have argued that the money - part of the 2009 budget year that begins in October 2008 - will be too late to help countries already struggling with the food price crisis. Bush's request for another $350 million for food aid as part of the 2008 supplemental budget for the war in Iraq has also been slammed by the opposition as too little.

Democrats Senator Robert Casey Jr and Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, who have asked Bush for at least $550 million in emergency food aid immediately, were quoted in the Post as saying: "That is far too late for the urgency of this problem. If you're hungry and your government is collapsing, waiting until December 2008 or January 2009 for food to hit the ground is just too late."

High food prices have been triggered by a host of factors, including dwindling stocks and a continuing strong demand for cereals, partly on account of an increased demand for meat and milk in India and China, and biofuels. According to the World Bank, high food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty.

jk/he http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78053DURBAN Wednesday, April 23, 2008 (IRIN) - The victims of human trafficking in Southern Africa are often invisible because many countries in the region have failed to implement laws to combat it, Hans Petter Boe, Regional Representative for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), said in his opening remarks at a conference in the South African port city of Durban.DURBAN Wednesday, April 23, 2008 (IRIN) - The victims of human trafficking in Southern Africa are often invisible because many countries in the region have failed to implement laws to combat it, Hans Petter Boe, Regional Representative for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), said in his opening remarks at a conference in the South African port city of Durban.

"The needs of victims of human trafficking are unique compared to those of other victims of abuse. Because many countries in the region have yet to legislate comprehensive anti-trafficking laws, many of these victims fall through the cracks," Boe told a regional workshop to protect victims of human trafficking.

The conference, titled 'Migration Dialogue for Southern Africa' was hosted by the IOM and the Southern African Migration Project, which aims to facilitate regional dialogue and cooperation on migration policy issues, and attended by civil society and government representatives from the Southern African Development Community.

Boe congratulated Mozambique for recently passing its first law geared specifically to combat human trafficking. "A great advance, to be emulated by other countries in the region," he said.

Lack of legislation has allowed traffickers to either escape prosecution or only be convicted of such crimes as rape, abduction or fraud, but beyond this
there are few national or regional mechanisms that afford the victims of trafficking any protection.

Poor intelligence on the numbers of people trafficked and the inherently clandestine nature of the activity mean the traffickers usually ply their harmful trade without fear of repercussion.

According to the IOM, trafficked persons often find themselves in situations where they are held against their will, their documents are taken from them, and they are abused and kept captive by reason of the debt they incurred while being taken across borders. It is made virtually impossible for them ever to repay this debt.

The UN protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, defines trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons by improper means, such as force, abduction, fraud or coercion, for an improper use or purpose, like forced labour, servitude, slavery or sexual exploitation. Countries that ratify the protocol are obliged to enact domestic laws making these activities criminal offences, if such laws are not already in place
Vulnerable people

Trafficked people are highly vulnerable: they have been brought into a country illegally, so they are reluctant to seek help from the authorities, fearing that they will be treated as illegal immigrants or criminals.

"Victims of human trafficking are exposed to extreme forms of dehumanisation and exploitation," Malusi Gigaba, the South African Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, a keynote speaker at the three-day conference, told IRIN.

"They are transported through a well-oiled trafficking system, using intricate and extensive networks to transport their 'human cargo'", Gigaba said.

Although the incidence of human trafficking is believed to be growing, accurate information on the extent of the trade remains elusive. The invisibility of the trade makes it difficult for countries in the region to allocate resources to anti-trafficking initiatives in the face of a host of other social problems, such as health care and poverty-related issues.

"All indications are that there are more and more people being trafficked, in particular in our region," Gigaba said. Steadily climbing migration flows and rising crime in southern Africa mean "there is now greater need for cooperation and urgency in combating [human trafficking] and providing protection to those that are most vulnerable," he told the delegates.

"It is good that the victims are getting more attention - human trafficking is a human rights issue; the women, the children, who are victims of human trafficking, deserve better treatment," Gigaba said.

"We cannot afford any more talk-shops that yield no outcomes. The action-steps are there; no one can claim to be clueless about what to do," he said.

tdm/go/he http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77888PORT LOUIS Sunday, April 20, 2008 (IRIN) - Norway and the European Union on Sunday urged southern African leaders to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe as their credibility was at stake. PORT LOUIS Sunday, April 20, 2008 (IRIN) - Norway and the European Union on Sunday urged southern African leaders to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe as their credibility was at stake.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told heads of government of the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) meeting in Mauritius that, “this situation should not be allowed to continue”.

Louis Michel, EU commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, called on SADC to find a solution to the Zimbabwean government’s refusal to accept the initial results of the 29 March elections, in which the opposition won control of parliament, and according to provisional vote returns, President Robert Mugabe also lost his job.

"The dramatic effects [of the crisis] will mainly hit the population of Zimbabwe but they will also hit the whole region," Michel said at the Mauritius gathering, billed as a ‘Development and Poverty’ summit. "I understand that this is not very easy to do … but this is an issue which is important for [SADC's] credibility."

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) on Saturday began a recount of ballots in 23 out of 210 constituencies, which could overturn the opposition’s parliamentary majority. The main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said the ballot boxes were being stuffed and it would not accept the recount.

The result of the presidential poll has yet to be released, three weeks after voting centres closed. It is expected that ZEC will order a runoff between Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, despite a growing climate of fear, in which opposition supporters are reportedly being persecuted by the security forces and militants of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

Zimbabwe was discussed at an extraordinary SADC summit in Zambia on 13 April. Then the region’s leaders called on ZEC to verify and release “expeditiously” the poll results “in compliance with the rule of law” and SADC’s electoral guidelines. But Michel said he had been told by heads of government in Mauritius that no further statement would be made before the end of the vote recount.

SADC officials on Sunday repeated that Zimbabwe was not up for discussion; they said the gathering was preoccupied with poverty and development issues, especially in the face of rocketing global food prices.

But Stoltenberg used his address to the summit to slam the Zimbabwean leadership. "The lack of results from the elections casts serious doubt about the willingness of the government to respect the voice of the people," he told heads of government. "The economic and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, seriously affects the country, its people and the whole region."

Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, Zimbabwe's foreign minister, leading his
country's delegation, rejected the criticism. "The vote counting is going fine," he told IRIN at the sidelines of the conference. "We will announce the results as soon we finish the count."

He later told reporters: "[The Norwegian Prime Minister] is clearly ill-informed. He is ignorant. Totally ignorant … Zimbabwe is a democracy."

On Sunday the 53-member African Union urged Zimbabwe to release the election results "without any further delay", and called for restraint from all parties.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77834JOHANNESBURG Friday, April 18, 2008 (IRIN) - However, Tsvangirai has said that the MDC would not take part in a presidential run-off ballot, as the high levels of violence and intimidation by Zimbabwe’s police and army since the first round of voting would amount to Mugabe "stealing the election".JOHANNESBURG Friday, April 18, 2008 (IRIN) - South African President Thabo Mbeki has been lampooned and condemned across the world for saying there is "no crisis" in Zimbabwe on his brief stopover in the capital, Harare, on the way to an emergency summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Zambia to discuss Zimbabwe’s disputed 29 March elections.

Now there is also a growing chorus from within the African National Congress (ANC), Mbeki's own party, in South Africa, the continent and the world for Mbeki to discard his much-maligned policy of "quiet diplomacy" and get tough on Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

Mbeki's comment that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe” drew a sharp response from Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), that Mbeki "needs to be relieved of his duties" as a mediator. The SADC appointed Mbeki to mediate between the MDC and the ruling ZANU-PF party in 2007.

One of the key provisions governing elections in Zimbabwe - that results be displayed outside polling stations - allowed Tsvangirai to claim victory in the presidential race by 50 percent plus one vote, which negates the need for a second round of voting.

The MDC overturned ZANU-PF’s parliamentary majority for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980, but the official result of the presidential election has still not been published, nearly three weeks after the poll.

Britain's Economist magazine said in an editorial, "Can Mr Mbeki seriously suggest, with a straight face, that the result would have been held back if Mr Mugabe had not lost?"

The Washington Post, under the headline “Rogue Democrat”, commented in an editorial: "The government of President Thabo Mbeki has consistently allied itself with the world's rogue states and against the Western democracies.

"It has defended Iran's nuclear program and resisted sanctions against it; shielded Sudan and Burma from the sort of pressure the United Nations once directed at the apartheid regime ... Now Mr Mbeki's perverse and immoral policy is reaching its nadir - in South Africa's neighbour, Zimbabwe."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed "deep concern" over the delay in publishing the presidential ballot at a UN Security Council meeting in New York, chaired by South Africa this week, and noted that "the credibility of the democratic process in Africa could be at stake here."

ANC spokesperson Jesse Duarte added to the Mbeki bashing: "It [the ANC] is concerned with the state of crisis that Zimbabwe is in and perceives this as negative for the entire SADC region."

It is not the first time that the ANC’s and Mbeki’s views on Zimbabwe have been out of step. In 1980, when Mugabe won Zimbabwe's first democratic elections, Mark Gevisser recounts in his biography, “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred”, that "Thabo Mbeki seemed to be one of the only ANC comrades [at a meeting] in the whole of Lusaka [capital of Zambia] who was not devastated [by the then ZANU party's victory]."

During the struggle against apartheid, the ANC was allied to Joshua Nkomo's rival ZAPU party. That night, Gevisser recounts in an interview with a mid-level ANC exile, the celebrations of Zimbabwe’s independence and shedding white rule were as if "at a wake. I think we even said we would rather have had [Ian] Smith [leader of white-ruled Rhodesia] than Mugabe."

In the early 1980s Mbeki was tasked with building relations between the ANC and Mugabe's ZANU party. Gevisser wrote on 17 April in the South African weekly newspaper, The Mail and & Guardian, that Mbeki admitted this relationship developed into one of “father [Mugabe] and son [Mbeki]”.

All diplomacy is quiet

Chris Maroleng, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, a Pretoria-based think-tank, told IRIN the "quiet diplomacy" label was a misnomer, as "all diplomacy is quiet."

He said, "Mbeki knows that open criticism of ZANU-PF creates intransigence, so he has steered away from public criticism." Post-apartheid South Africa learnt to its cost that public criticism of other African governments, even ones that had no pretensions to democracy, was a high-risk game.

Maroleng pointed out that the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other political activists in Nigeria on trumped-up charges by Sani Abacha's military dictatorship saw a "serious backlash" from other African countries after South Africa's founding president, Nelson Mandela, called for sanctions against the oil-rich nation,.

From then on, Maroleng said, South Africa's foreign policy has been multilateral in its approach and always "wary of pushing a Western agenda, in case it is seen as a proxy or lackey of the West".

South Africa's economic clout on the continent - it produces 25 percent of Africa's GDP - has led to it being given disparaging labels such as the "Yanks of Africa", but this is not mirrored in its broad diplomatic engagement on the continent.

On 17 April, after the UN Security Council meeting, Themba Maseko, South Africa's ambassador to the UN, said the situation in Zimbabwe was "dire", and the delay in releasing the poll results was "obviously of great concern".

Maroleng said this was being interpreted by many as a policy shift, but South Africa had criticised human rights abuses by Mugabe in the past, although "maybe not in the manner people would like to see."

Mbeki has always sought "homegrown" solutions rather than imposing them, Maroleng commented, and while "strong on pragmatism, it [this approach] can be weak on principle", but he [Mbeki] has "an aversion to force."

In March 2008, on the eve of an African Union (AU) military operation to reclaim Anjouan, an island in the Comoros archipelago, from renegade leader Mohamed Bacar after nine months of fruitless negotiations, Mbeki said the operation should be delayed.

Much to the chagrin of the AU, Mbeki told an international news agency on 12 March that Bacar had offered to hold fresh elections, and "this is really the way that we should go. I don't think there is any need to do anything apart or additional to that." AU troops landed on the island a few days later and encountered minimal resistance.

SADC member states and the AU are not contemplating any military action against Zimbabwe, and probably never would, although Article 4 of the AU Constitution gives permission "to intervene in grave circumstances that include war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as a serious threat to legitimate order".

A shipment of Chinese small arms, ammunition and rocket propelled grenades en route to Zimbabwe is being held up in the South African port city of Durban, not by Mbeki's government, but by unionised workers refusing to unload the ship's cargo because they are concerned that the weapons could be used against Mugabe's opponents.

Maroleng said such a worst-case scenario "is a continuation of what is going on now [the refusal to announce presidential results, and the alleged beatings and assaults of MDC supporters] and ultimately a clampdown by Mugabe, backed by the military, and a worsening of the humanitarian situation and the inability of the region [SADC] to change things."

A more likely scenario might be a second round of voting, with an enhanced mission of SADC observers, and assistance by South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission.

However, Tsvangirai has said that the MDC would not take part in a presidential run-off ballot, as the high levels of violence and intimidation by Zimbabwe’s police and army since the first round of voting would amount to Mugabe "stealing the election".

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77828JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, April 16, 2008 (IRIN) - High food prices have brought social unrest but they have also provided a "window of opportunity" to review global policies on the response to food insecurity, said a leading food aid analyst as experts and aid agencies began an unprecedented strategic re-think at a three-day meeting in Rome on 16 April. JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, April 16, 2008 (IRIN) - High food prices have brought social unrest but they have also provided a "window of opportunity" to review global policies on the response to food insecurity, said a leading food aid analyst as experts and aid agencies began an unprecedented strategic re-think at a three-day meeting in Rome on 16 April.

Events in the past week have borne out the International Monetary Fund's warning that the consequences of a 48 percent hike in food prices since 2006 "will be terrible": the Haitian government fell for apparently having done little to stem week-long food riots. A string of protests, some violent, over food price rises have also hit several West African and Asian countries.

This has created a sense of urgency even "if it has highlighted one element in policy debate of short-term response, such as food aid", according to Daniel Maxwell, associate professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Boston-based Tufts University.

High food and fuel prices have hit food aid hard. "In 2007, food aid represented 34 percent of global humanitarian contributions, down from almost 50 percent in 2000 ... For the 2008 CAP [Consolidated appeals Process] food as a sector represents 36 percent of the total appeal,” said a policy document, Rethinking Food Security in Humanitarian Response.

“In other words, there is likely to be far less food aid available in 2008, and this continues a downward trend in this sector that started several years ago."

The document is being used as the basis for the three-day conference organised by the relief and development agencies, CARE and Oxfam, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's headquarters in Rome.

The authors - Maxwell, Patrick Webb, Jennifer Coates and James Wirth - have raised questions on the need for better analysis: assessment of need and measurement of impact; effectiveness of response; the need for greater attention to risk reduction; aid architecture - should agencies be structured to specialise in humanitarian or development issues; funding - should there be separate funding streams for the Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) and Flash Appeals; and policy reforms – re-examining the mandates, roles and future of humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The current crisis triggered by food prices has not only forced the aid community to look more closely at emergency aid distribution systems but also at development opportunities to find long-term solutions, said David Kauck, CARE's senior policy analyst.

As the document pointed out, there is an overemphasis on response, which is "often too little too late", rather than on prevention, "a failure to sustainably alleviate suffering, and a steady erosion of many populations' ability to cope with the twin threats of chronic suffering and repeat shocks".

The need to re-think

Years of humanitarian assistance often does not seem to noticeably reduce dependency. "In the period between 2003 and 2006, Somalia received roughly US$1 billion in net disbursements of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), compared with only $161 million in 1995-96.

“It is a country that gained visibility as one of the most distantly affected by the Asian tsunami in 2005, and earned a degree of geopolitical significance in the global "war on terror" during 2006-07,” the authors of the policy document noted.

Yet, in 2008 Somalia features prominently in the Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), with an estimated need for humanitarian aid amounting to $406 million. Apparently, neither food insecurity nor humanitarian need have been effectively resolved in Somalia to date. Why not?"

Possibly "conditions have recently deteriorated - which is partly true, given the continued absence of stable governance, competing political agendas, armed conflict, and repeated natural shocks (droughts, floods, locusts)," the authors argued.

"On the other hand, it could be that resources used in recent years have been inadequate to the task of resolving or at least mitigating such shocks, or the wrong kind of assistance was given, or aid was used in the wrong ways, or resources were spent very inefficiently - all of which may also be true," they commented.

However, some countries appear to be improving in their food security, with reduced emergency appeals, "some things are apparently being done right; what are those things, and are they replicable? Lessons need to be shared on how to leverage and maximise such gains-which in many cases remain very fragile,", said the authors.

New drivers

The document also warned that there were new drivers of humanitarian crises: the rising frequency of natural disasters, partly as a result of climate change; conflict-related deaths might have declined but the impact of conflicts - disease, displacement and trauma among other issues - would continue to unfold.

The number of people affected by disasters has continued to grow since the 1980s. Based on those upward trends, "by 2050 natural disasters could have a global cost of over US$300 billion a year, and will be a key element in the failure to meet the Millennium Development Goals," said the document.

The humanitarian crises triggered by natural disasters have been aggravated by the "rising concentration of people in vulnerable locations, and the growing vulnerability of people in poorest countries - particularly those exposed to eroded natural resources - as well as depletion of human capital due to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other debilitating diseases".

Climate change is likely to aggravate existing production and consumption constraints in food-insecure countries, besides the current food and fuel prices, which are also cause for concern, the authors point out.

Nearly one-third of the world's extremely poor people - 27 percent – live in countries that are fragile or conflict-affected and will also be vulnerable to additional hazards, whether natural disasters or new forms of conflict such as "resource wars" - contested use of natural resources, including water, oil and even arable land – which, according to some analysts, will become increasingly likely.

"This suggests a need for more focus on linkages between governance failures (including breakdown in delivery of services), conflicts, and humanitarian outcomes (such as epidemics...)," the authors warn.

"The scale of the problem we face today [because of these new drivers] is daunting - we can be overwhelmed by the caseload - so coordination of a global response is needed," said Kauck.

The need for coordination

Some of the debates on rethinking policy are old, said Fred Mousseau, a policy advisor to Oxfam. "But the policy document has taken a broader look at humanitarian aid interventions, with emphasis on disaster prevention and mitigation, the role of relief and development. It has, for the first time, forced the global aid community to rethink our role strategically."

The authors of the document said that "While there has been much lip service given to both social protection and disaster risk reduction as categories of programmes, they are still new categories - risk prevention does not show up in official ODA accounting until 2005, and then only in miniscule amount. Social protection isn't accounted as a sector or programmatic category".

They cautioned that a lack of effective leadership and collaboration among so-called food agencies and their collaborating financial institutions has been posited as leaving a power vacuum that "will be filled by multinational agribusiness and the new philanthro-capitalists."

Maxwell told IRIN that the intention was not to advocate a top-down approach envisioning a "global bureaucracy", but the emphasis was rather on better collaboration between agencies.

jk/he/oahttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77802JOHANNESBURG Friday, April 11, 2008 (IRIN) - Rely more on local produce to cut food import bills and provide subsidised inputs to boost production, advised the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as it announced measures to help poor countries, many of which will now have to pay 74 percent more for food - up by US$6 billion from February 2008. JOHANNESBURG Friday, April 11, 2008 (IRIN) - Rely more on local produce to cut food import bills and provide subsidised inputs to boost production, advised the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as it announced measures to help poor countries, many of which will now have to pay 74 percent more for food - up by US$6 billion from February 2008.

Under the Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP), FAO will kick-off with short-term measures such as providing subsidised fertiliser to boost food production in three African countries affected by food riots - Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal. Mozambique, the fourth African country, included in the pilot will use a blend of cassava and wheat flour to produce bread to help reduce the country's wheat import bill.

"The initiative will be rolled out in other countries in the second phase," said Liliana Balbi, senior economist with FAO's Global Information and Early Warning Service. Details of the second phase were not announced.

The UN agency also announced the launch of Food Market Information Units (FMIU) in countries worldwide to help monitor, collect and analyse food prices to help humanitarian agencies and countries come up with more nuanced responses to food insecurity and vulnerability. FAO has allocated US$17 million towards the two measures.

The sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices has pushed up the food import bills in many low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, said the new FAO Crop Prospects and Food Situation Report released on 11 April. World cereal stocks are expected to fall to a 25-year-low of 405 million tonnes in 2007/08, down 21 million tonnes, or 5 percent, from their already reduced level of the previous year.

Soaring price initiative

The ISFP pilot project will assist vulnerable farmers that are not able to take advantage of high prices - because of insufficient access to inputs - to increase local production, according to Shukri Ahmed, Senior Economist at FAO. For example in Kenya, "the greater disruption of markets, which followed the political unrest, has produced an increase in the cost of agricultural inputs. As a result, about half of the agricultural land in North Rift, the key maize producing area, has not yet been prepared for the planting season this month. The farmers in these situations need assistance," he added

Fuel and food prices have also affected the cost of agricultural production - "farm labour wages have gone up, inputs have become more expensive," explained Ahmed.

International cereal prices have continued to rise sharply over the past two months, reflecting steady demand and depleted world reserves, the FAO report said. Rice prices increased the most following the imposition of new export restrictions by major exporting countries. By the end of March prices of wheat and rice were about double their levels of a year earlier, while those of maize were more than one-third higher, according to the report.

Despite governments' efforts to prevent the cost of food in their countries from being influenced by soaring global cereal prices, essentials such as bread, rice, maize products, milk and soybean have continued to become more expensive.

The situation calls for alternative measures such as using what is available locally to help lower food import bills, pointed out Frans Van De Ven, FAO acting Resident Representative in Mozambique.

Mozambique which imports 100 percent of its wheat requirement largely used to produce bread, will now experiment with cassava flour, said Tatenda Mutenga, FAO's information officer in Mozambique. After several studies including one on consumer preferences, the UN agency along with the Mozambican government will launch a project to manufacture bread using a blend of cassava and wheat flour in the central Zambezia province in May 2008.

Price analysis

But the impact of soaring food prices on the vulnerable has also highlighted the need for a comprehensive price analysis, which has prompted the launch of FMIUs. "Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations," said Henri Josserand of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning system. "Food represents about 10-20 percent of consumer spending in industrialised nations, but as much as 60-80 percent in developing countries, many of which are net-food-importers".

Differing foreign exchange rates, tax regimens and agricultural policies require countries to come up with "individualised responses" to global food price increases, pointed out Ahmed. "From a UN agency's point of view, the units will help analyse for example what impact a 20 percent increase in food prices would have on vulnerability at global, regional, national and household levels - and help us determine responses to improving food security."

According to FAO’s first forecast world cereal production in 2008 is to increase by 2.6 percent to a record 2,164 million tonnes. The bulk of the increase is expected in wheat, following significant expansion in plantings in major producing countries.

"Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season," the report said.

But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.

jk/tdm/go http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77730BRAZZAVILE Wednesday, April 09, 2008 (IRIN) - Climate change is emerging as a major threat to health and adding pressure on public health systems, especially in Africa, a senior UN official has said. BRAZZAVILE Wednesday, April 09, 2008 (IRIN) - Climate change is emerging as a major threat to health and adding pressure on public health systems, especially in Africa, a senior UN official has said.

"It causes a rise in sea levels, accelerates erosion of coastal zones, increases the intensity and frequency of natural disasters and accelerates the extinction of species," Luis Gomes Sambo, World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Africa, said. "The impact on human health is even greater."

Climate change, he added, is thought to directly contribute to changes in the geographic distribution of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and epidemics of meningococcal meningitis, Rift Valley fever and cholera in previously unaffected areas.

"For example, the geographic distribution of meningococcal meningitis appears to be expanding from the usual meningitis belt to the southern African region," Sambo said on 7 April during the commemoration of World Health Day in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo.

"Waterborne diseases and epidemics of acute diarrhoea are rampant in flood situations," he added. The continent has seen extensive flooding across eastern, western and southern regions.

He said WHO would give priority support to African countries to develop the capacity to assess and manage the adverse health impact of climate change.

In terms of health capacity, Africa faces a crisis. For example, it has 14 percent of the world population and 25 percent of the global disease burden - yet it has only 1.3 percent of global health workers.

While 2.5 health workers per 10,000 inhabitants are needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the health worker/population ratio in Africa is 0.8 per 10,000. Out of 57 countries experiencing critical shortages of health workers, 36 are in Africa.

To improve the situation, according to the WHO, one million more health workers are immediately needed in Africa. Facilities in health centres also need major improvements.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that climate change jeopardises the quality and availability of water and food, which are the fundamental determinants of nutrition and health.

In a message marking World Health Day, Ban noted that malnutrition and climate-related infectious diseases will take their heaviest toll on the most vulnerable – small children, the elderly and the infirm.

Women living in poverty also faced particular risk when natural disasters and other global warming-related dangers strike. "Climate change is real, it is accelerating and it threatens all of us," he said.

lmm/aw/eo/mwhttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77675DUBAI Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (IRIN) - Global demand for humanitarian assistance is likely to grow in the coming decade because of climate change, warned John Holmes, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. DUBAI Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (IRIN) - Global demand for humanitarian assistance is likely to grow in the coming decade because of climate change, warned John Holmes, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.

In his keynote speech to the fifth Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development Conference & Exhibition (DIHAD) on 8 April, Holmes said: "What we are witnessing is not an aberration, but rather a ‘curtain raiser’ on the future."

The conference, which ends on 10 April, addresses four main subjects - future crises, technology innovation, future challenges and emerging trends.

"We are already beginning to feel the effects: last winter, large swathes of Central Asia were devastated by the most severe weather for nearly three decades. Cyclone Gonu, which hit the [Arabian] Gulf coast last June, was one of the most severe cyclones ever to hit this part of the world,” Holmes said.

He said such events were "not abnormal" but were the "new normal".

Disaster risk reduction

Reviewing the number of recorded disasters in the world, Holmes said these have doubled from about 200 to over 400 per year over the last two decades, with nine out of every 10 disasters now climate-related.

Despite the rise in the number of disasters, the level of preparedness remains inadequate. “What we are trying to do now is to promote disaster risk reduction. It is not just being prepared for the disaster, but to reduce the impact of the disaster that we know is going to happen,” Holmes told IRIN after his keynote address.

“For example, in Bangladesh we know that there will be flooding every year… so you try to make sure that people are not living in the most flood-prone area and houses are built in the most flood-resistant way. This does not stop the flood from happening but it reduces its impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods,” he said.

Last year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued an unprecedented 15 funding appeals for sudden natural disasters, five more than the previous annual record. Fourteen of these appeals were climate-related.

During the last decade, the world has paid more attention to global warming and climate change. A UN Climate Change Conference was held in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 to step up efforts to combat climate change and to launch formal negotiations for a long-term international agreement at the conference in Copenhagen to be held towards the end of 2009. These negotiations will also lay down measures and obligations after the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period (end of 2012).

Food prices

Some experts say climate change has been a contributory factor in recent food price rises. These have led to riots in numerous countries, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Mauritania, Mexico, Pakistan, Senegal, and Yemen.

“Since mid-2007, food prices have risen an estimated 40 percent as a confluence of factors has increased demand. These factors include rapid global population growth, ever greater numbers of people eating resource-intensive foods such as meat and milk, bio-fuel production, shortage of reserves, and increasing oil prices,” Holmes said.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in February that 36 countries were in crisis as a result of bad weather and conflicts and would require external assistance.

dvh/ar/cb http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77667JOHANNESBURG Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (IRIN) - Recent attacks on Somali, Zimbabwean and Mozambican migrants in South Africa have been labeled xenophobic: but could the violence point to a much bigger problem than fear of the foreign, a problem much closer to home? JOHANNESBURG Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (IRIN) - Recent attacks on Somali, Zimbabwean and Mozambican migrants in South Africa have been labeled xenophobic: but could the violence point to a much bigger problem than fear of the foreign, a problem much closer to home?

Less than a month ago, three men died in mob attacks aimed at foreigners throughout the Brazzaville, Saulsville, Phomolong and Vergenoeg informal settlements west of South Africa's capital, Pretoria. As their shops and homes were looted and burned, many foreign nationals sought refugee at the nearby Atteridgeville police station; some were taken to Lindela repatriation centre for deportation, while about 560 ended up housed in a local school, according to Home Affairs spokesperson, Mantshela Tau.

With school resuming after the Easter holidays, a remaining group of about 150 - including 22 children - have now been moved to a large vacant storefront in Pretoria that remains under tight security. Meanwhile, no timetable has been set to implement the decision by Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula and Pretoria's mayor, Gwen Ramokgopa, to resettle them in their former communities – supposedly hand-in-hand with a series of community meetings to help ease tensions, Tau said.

Attacks on foreigners in South Africa are far from new. But according to Jack Redden, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) regional spokesperson, there has been an alarming increase in recent months; and no one is quite sure why.

"We've heard about six different incidents since the end of January," Redden said. "They're getting increasingly nasty and increasingly violent."

UNHCR has been working with the government in a long-standing campaign to “roll back xenophobia”; it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on Tshepo Serala. At noon on a Tuesday, he was sitting in the sun with friends in front of a small shop in the Brazzaville informal settlement where he lives, and offered his opinion on the violence.

"They take our jobs," was his justification. “As South Africans our education is low and those people, they know business and some are educated."

"I can say it's better without them," said Sipho Seheri, from the neighboring settlement of Jessville. "They were doing some serious crime ...But I can show you foreigners who are working straight [who are not involved in crime] and they are still staying here. It's just that most of them are doing crime."

An unemployment rate estimated at around 40 percent, bitterness over the snail’s pace of service delivery, criminal violence organised by local business rivals to shut down foreign-owned stores, a perverse chauvinism inculcated by apartheid – it has all been used to explain the anger meted out to foreigners, and the fear among some South Africans they are on the losing end in a competition for too few resources.

For generations migrant workers from across the region have been drawn to South Africa. At the end of minority rule in 1994, the numbers of immigrants accelerated; along with the sentiment that foreigners were somehow taking advantage of the system, even though the economic benefits of migration in terms of skills sharing, job-creation and trade is championed by the government.

Dr Asa August Ngwezi, a clinical psychologist who runs a local NGO in Atteridgeville, and who provided counselling to victims of the attacks, said the violence was a mix of desperation and ignorance, especially among young South Africans.

"I work everyday with people that are desperate from hunger and unemployment, young people. People have lost faith in the leadership at the top, the police and local government," he said. "You move into a foreigner's shop, it is well stocked with food, you are hungry, you have no money, what happens? Mob psychology."

"[These attacks] was not done by elderly people, this was done by young people," Ngwezi commented. "Our freedom couldn't have happened without the Mugabes, the Machels, and the Kaundas. Their efforts led to our emancipation, but in South Africa – and I'm not afraid to say this - most young people are not politically up to scratch."

Representatives from South Africa's Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), a
statutory body charged with monitoring human rights, visited Atteridgeville soon after the violence, and recommended that South Africa ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

Ratifying the convention would level the playing field in terms of jobs and resources, explained SAHRC media manager, Vincent Moaga.

"Right now there are foreign nationals working on farms in Limpopo [in the north] for
poor pay and in bad conditions," he said. "With no legal framework to provide for their protection they will work for anything."

By extending legal protection to non-citizens and forcing employers to pay foreign and local hires alike, foreign labourers would cease to undercut local workers. “The local populations would feel less resentful because they would all be treated the same," Moaga argued.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77671ADDIS ABABA Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Tayech Ali arrived half an hour before the grain distribution centre in Gojam Berenda, in the capital, Addis Ababa, opened, but still had to queue for three hours before she could buy some wheat.ADDIS ABABA Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Tayech Ali arrived half an hour before the grain distribution centre in Gojam Berenda, in the capital, Addis Ababa, opened, but still had to queue for three hours before she could buy some wheat.

"I cannot afford to buy wheat from the market," Tayech, a single mother of five, told IRIN. "It is too expensive."

A beneficiary of an Ethiopian government programme that supplies 25kg of subsidised wheat monthly to low-income urban dwellers, Tayech has experienced this routine every two months since the initiative started in March 2007.

She qualified for the programme because she is a widow and former street vegetable vendor with no regular income. Standing in the queue at the grain distribution centre - one of 77 in the capital - Tayech said she was worried about possible disorder from the crowd, a frequent occurrence.

"I am not worried about the long line," she told IRIN. "But unexpected disorder could extend my stay in this place."

Ethiopian officials say the grain-subsidy programme was a response to the hardships faced by low-income urban dwellers because of escalating inflation rates - which they blame on the rising costs of oil and other commodities, including grain.

Speaking in parliament on 18 March, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said: "While our current economic development is encouraging, worsening inflation has created a difficult situation for the low-income urban dwellers."

World commodity prices

Ethiopia is just one of the many African countries reeling from the impact of rising global commodity prices. According to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, rising food and energy prices could hurt Africa's growth in the 21st century.

"Rapid escalation in food and energy prices, if not managed properly, could pose significant threats to growth and employment, good governance, peace and security," it stated in a paper, Meeting Africa's New Development challenges in the 21st Century, prepared for the annual conference of African finance ministers in Addis Ababa at end-March.

It attributed recent social disturbances in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Mauritania to rising staple food prices. The situation could also erode progress on achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

The number of food-insecure people, it noted, could rise worldwide by more than 16 million for every percentage increase in the real prices of staple foods, meaning 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2050. That is 600 million more than previously predicted.

In response, the ministers urged the African Union Commission and the African Development Bank to study the feasibility of setting up an oil fund to assist the continent’s low-income oil-importing countries to mitigate the effects of high prices.

They also committed to undertake "vigorous measures" to implement the comprehensive African agricultural development programme.

In December, the Famine Early Warning Systems warned that high cereal and commodity prices in Addis Ababa, and several other monitored markets, including Bahir Dar, Mekelle and Dire Dawa, would affect food security for many of Ethiopia's urban dwellers.

Market-related factors and decreased production would render an estimated eight million Ethiopians food-insecure this year, while 2.4 million acutely food-insecure people would require food and cash assistance.

Of these, 825,000 Ethiopian urban dwellers, including Tayech, already rely on wheat supplied through the government's distribution centres.

"There is food on the shelves but people cannot afford it," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said during a recent visit to Ethiopia and Kenya. Food insecurity among urban dwellers had created "a new face of hunger".

"People who were not previously vulnerable have become vulnerable in many different countries around the world," she said. There was more urban hunger than traditionally thought and it tended to hit hardest those earning less than a dollar a day.

Funding gap

The situation has also affected aid agencies. WFP, in an appeal to donors on 20 March, said soaring food and fuel prices had created a critical funding gap of US$500 million in its programmes as at February.

"In the three weeks since that announcement, food prices have increased another 20 percent and such increases show no sign of abating any time soon," the agency said.

Sheeran said WFP would try to assist the urban hungry by partnering with governments to break the hunger cycle. The plan would involve a shift from being a purely food-aid to a food-assistance agency.

"We will have broader tools to help countries deal with urgent hunger pressures that can be more sensitive to markets," Sheeran told journalists after addressing the African finance ministers.

Experts predict more difficult times ahead. "All indicators suggest that food prices are unlikely to fall any time soon and, in fact, may rise much more depending on countries' decisions about biofuels," says Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI).

For Africa's poor, whose meagre earnings are being eroded by inflation, the choices are often limited to either buying less food or buying cheaper, less nutritious food. "The result is the same - more hunger and less chance of a healthy future," notes WFP.

tw/eo/mwhttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77640JOHANNESBURG Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Food prices have the potential to change regimes and the course of history. When Marie Antoinette allegedly said, "Let them eat cake" in 1789, she was wondering why higher bread prices were causing so much trouble in Paris. JOHANNESBURG Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Food prices have the potential to change regimes and the course of history. When Marie Antoinette allegedly said, "Let them eat cake" in 1789, she was wondering why higher bread prices were causing so much trouble in Paris.

Food security analysts, NGOs, think-tanks and the World Bank all say pushing the urban poor beyond their purchasing limits can and will cause unrest, and net food-importing countries are most at risk. Leaders may not be facing the guillotine in 2008, but some are already feeling the sharp edge of popular uprising. The most obvious tools to cushion the impact of the price rises - tax cuts and subsidies - not only go against free-market dictums but are frequently unaffordable for governments, analysts say.

"Governments don't generally worry overmuch for the fate of poor people most affected by dearth - until the protests mount," said John Walton, who teaches sociology at the University of California, and is co-author of Free Markets and Food Riots. "Regrettably, these pains are often justified in neo-liberal economic ideology as necessary reforms, despite a lack of evidence for their effectiveness."

The recent spate of food riots and demonstrations in West Africa may signal a new phase in the protest cycle, he said. Many analysts agree.

At least two dozen deaths have been reported in riots sparked by a sharp increase in food and fuel prices around the world, most recently in Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire.

IMF riots

The last protest wave arose in the late 1970s in response to food and fuel price hikes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and lender countries forced poor countries to implement budget cuts. The impact was felt worldwide, beginning in Latin America and extending to Africa and Asia, to include perhaps 200 instances in over 40 countries, according to Walton.

The protests, known as the "IMF riots", were marked by strikes, demonstrations, rioting and looting and prompted by the contention that "the poor were being made to suffer" because of the "profligate lending by governments and banks", he said. "These protests had varied effects, destabilising governments in some places, winning reforms in others, and inviting repression in many.

"Sudan in 1982 was a case where the government fell largely as the result of austerity protests,” he explained. “In lots of other places [Peru] regime-changing elections have been moved along by unrest."

While the current protests have been sparked by the hike in petrol prices and the related impact on food costs, noted Walton, “the instances of popular demonstration and riots in Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Burkina Faso replicate in many ways the protest repertoire and sense of injustice that characterised the IMF riots and earlier historical protest cycles. Time will tell how large the current protest wave will become.”

“Agflation” is the new buzzword to describe the food price hikes, on account of an increase in demand for cereals such as maize and soybean for human consumption and biofuels. The price of non-fuel-related grains such as rice and wheat has also rocketed.

The World Bank announced last week that at least 33 countries, which depend largely on imported food, could face potential social unrest. Kanayo Nwanze, vice-president of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), warned: "The escalation of social unrest we have seen in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal may become commonplace in other African countries."

Protests have also been reported in many Asian countries, especially the Philippines, where rice prices are reported to have gone up by 70 percent within a year. According to the Wall Street Journal, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is considering a moratorium on using agricultural land for housing developments or golf courses. Her government is urging fast-food restaurants to offer half-portions of rice to cut the country's rice bill.

“Resource scarcity is a long-term problem, and is likely to get worse with climate change - which will see reduced productivity, especially in countries where resources such as land, food, income, are ‘captured’ by an elite, and/or where inequalities are particularly bad,” according to social historian Diana Cammack, with the UK Overseas Development Institute.

The riots are about access to food, she points out, “where the poor have a reduced chance [compared to the rich] of getting to the food that is in the country … famines are often linked not simply to scarcity but to the cost of food and thus access to it”.

Urban poor

Historically, the politicised and educated urban population has been the brains behind most of the food riots, noted Marc Cohen, research fellow at the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “Governments have tended to provide them [urban residents] with subsidies to prevent them from becoming discontent.”

Potential political unrest is a bigger reality in urban areas, where residents, who are mostly wage earners, feel the impact of food prices more acutely, added Cammack. “Can some politician use the situation to better his career? Then you have real problems!”

There is already a “tremendous amount of anger” in urban areas in most African countries around several issues such as high unemployment rates and social delivery, said David Zounmenou, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies. “High food prices can only add fuel to this and can be exploited by the opposition or other interest groups to create instability.”

He added that “political discontent” was “already brewing” in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal. After the violent price protests in Cameroon, which left at least 24 people dead, President Paul Biya went on state media on 27 February during the rioting to say that “certain politicians” were seeking to overthrow his government in a coup d’état.

Tempers have been quelled in Cote d’Ivoire, which witnessed two days of violent protests in which one person was killed. The government announced a 50 percent cut in VAT last week, said Auguste Kpognon, country director of CARE in Cote D’Ivoire. “But we are waiting for an explanation from the government about how it intends to pay for it.”

The government in Guinea last week announced it had ended subsidies on diesel, petrol and oil. El Hadj Gando Diallo, an adviser in the ministry of economy, finances and planning, said the government had to end the subsidies as one of the conditions imposed by the IMF for future funding.

“We could have a potentially explosive situation there,” said Zounmenou. Guineans staged violent protests against price hikes in 2007, in which at least 200 people were killed. The Guinean government has long used fuel subsidies to quell tensions over the rising cost of living. It last increased subsidies in June 2006 following union-led strikes over the cost of living.

Stop-gap subsidies

Subsidies are not a sustainable solution, according to Cohen. “A case in point is the urban population in Egypt, which has enjoyed subsidies for many decades. Should subsidies be removed, things can get very violent - but subsidies are increasingly unaffordable.” Egypt is reportedly the world's second-largest importer of wheat.

According to the Middle East Business Intelligence, the Egyptian government “seems to be losing control of spending on subsidies. It budgeted for $1.7 billion worth of food subsidies in the current tax year, but spending will be $2.2 billion or even higher because of the increase in global food prices at the end of 2007.”

Matein Khalid, an analyst, noted in his column for the Dubai-based newspaper, Khaleej Times, that bread has been subsidised by the rulers of Egypt since Pharaonic times. “… food price surges are more of a threat to regime stability than Dr Zawahiri’s Al Qaeda terrorists. Bread queues turn violent, a recurrent theme in Egyptian history …”

Agricultural investment

A long-term sustainable solution would be to invest in agriculture, believes Cohen. But political stability governs investment in agriculture. A scenario by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS), which assumed a near-28 percent increase in grain prices for 2007 (prices have actually doubled in many countries since then), followed by increases of 1 percent a year through 2016, found that in sub-Saharan Africa, countries most susceptible to economic shocks are often those suffering from political instability, which stifles domestic production.

The ERS study found that Cote d’Ivoire would face the greatest shock, with the food gap jumping to an estimated 58 percent by 2016. “This country has been experiencing political problems during the last decade, with grain production virtually stagnant between 1990 and the early 2000s. To maintain grain supplies for a growing population, grain imports rose, and have been virtually equal to production for the past five years or so. The 28 percent price shock is projected to significantly weaken the country’s commercial import capacity, worsening food security.”

The World Bank last week announced it intended to double its lending from $450 million to $800 million for the fiscal year 2009 to Africa to help revive agriculture, in a bid to combat escalating food prices.

Most policy-makers agree that countries have to take a dual approach: social protection of the poor and productivity enhancement in agriculture.

In the meantime, price controls can keep people content for only the "short term", noted Zounmenou.

jk/bp/mw http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77646BANGKOK Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Countries, mostly in the developing world could spend between US$6 to $18 billion a year by 2030 to manage additional costs to health services as a result of climate change, according to independent research cited by a World Health Organisation (WHO) official, hence the need for rich countries responsible for global warming to help pay towards these additional health costs. BANGKOK Monday, April 07, 2008 (IRIN) - Countries, mostly in the developing world could spend between US$6 to $18 billion a year by 2030 to manage additional costs to health services as a result of climate change, according to independent research cited by a World Health Organisation (WHO) official, hence the need for rich countries responsible for global warming to help pay towards these additional health costs.

"That figure was based on a WHO assessment, which found that modest global warming since the 1970s was already causing over 150,000 excess deaths every year by 2000 - the costs and the estimates would now be higher," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, one of the authors of a new WHO report, released on World Health Day.

The assessment was based on studies on the impact of climate-sensitive illnesses like diarrhoeal disease, which is the second leading infectious cause of childhood mortality, and accounts for a total of around 1.8 million deaths each year. "For example, rates of diarrhoeal disease in Lima, Peru, are 3–4 times higher in the summer than in the winter, increasing by 8 percent for every 1°C increase in temperature," he said. "But the 2000 assessment did not take into account the impact of climate change on water stress or displacement of people as a result of famines." The WHO has announced the launch of a new assessment.

Each year, about 800,000 people die from causes attributable to urban air pollution. The last decades of the 20th century has also seen the re-emergence and regional spread of many existing climate-sensitive infections: such as cholera and Rift Valley fever in Africa, and dengue in Latin America and South Asia, said the WHO report. "These outbreaks can cause major economic losses. For example, a cholera outbreak in Peru in 1991 cost approximately $ 770 million, and the 1994 plague outbreak in India US$ 1.7 billion.

"When infectious diseases appear in new locations, where people do not have immunity and health services may not have experience in controlling or treating infections, the effects can be dramatic. When an outbreak of mosquito-borne Chikungunya disease occurred in Réunion in 2005–2006, it affected 1 in 10 of the population and decreased tourism, the island’s main economic sector," said the report.

The burden of climate sensitive diseases is the greatest on the poorest population," said Campbell-Lendrum. For example, the per capita mortality rate from vector-borne diseases is almost 300 times greater in developing nations than in developed regions. This is because vector-borne diseases are more common in tropical climates of many developing countries, and also because of low levels of socioeconomic development and coverage of health services in these areas.

Many of the measures that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as shifting to cleaner energy sources, could bring important health "co-benefits" to
communities and individuals, for example through reduced air pollution, pointed out Campbell-Lendrum.

More than money

Last week climate change negotiators in Bangkok signed off on a work plan that includes all the major themes including paying for poor countries' adaptation costs essential to reach a breakthrough agreement on emissions reductions next year in Copenhagen.

"Negotiations at a conference such as in Bangkok are divorced from the reality of the impact of climate on people's health and livelihoods already unfolding in the affected countries," said Bill Hare, Climate Policy Advisor for Greenpeace International. He said he hoped the "reality of people's suffering" would filter through the process at the 2009 Copenhagen meeting.

The five-day conference was building on the Kyoto Protocol, in which 37 industrialised countries and the European Community committed to reducing emissions by an average of five percent against 1990 levels from 2008 to 2012. New scientific findings show that even if the Kyoto targets are reached, it would still not be enough to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, including water stress, agricultural changes, severe weather, urban displacement and the possibility that low-lying island nations will be completely submerged.

"This meeting accomplished as much as it could,” a UN spokesperson, who did not want to be named, said. “It’s basically a road map of a road map.”

Delegates also decided to keep the market-based mechanisms for reducing emissions in place. These include carbon trading and the Clean Development Mechanism, which provides incentives for companies to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and also supports ways to finance adaptation measures for countries most vulnerable to rising sea levels, water shortages and changing rainfall patterns.

The deal essentially sets the agenda for the meetings to follow, in June in Germany, in August in Ghana and in December in Poznan, Poland. Yet it also provided a glimpse into the fights still to come as negotiators seek to thrash out what they call one of the most complex international agreements ever.

In Bangkok, most of the delegations comprised traditional negotiating teams with no high-level representation. UN officials said they expected some tougher political decisions to be made at the end of the year at the meeting Poland, which will be attended by ministerial-level delegates. Questions over finance and technology transfer will likely not be resolved until the final meeting in Copenhagen.

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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77651NEW YORK Sunday, April 06, 2008 (IRIN) - With soaring food prices expected to continue for the foreseeable future, the World Bank is calling for a “new deal” of long-term measures, ranging from increased investment in African agriculture to genetically engineering fuel-producing plants. NEW YORK Sunday, April 06, 2008 (IRIN) - With soaring food prices expected to continue for the foreseeable future, the World Bank is calling for a “new deal” of long-term measures, ranging from increased investment in African agriculture to genetically engineering fuel-producing plants.

Aid organisations are already confronting growing financial shortfalls in their struggle to feed the world’s hungry as food prices have exploded over the past six months, propelled by increased demand from newly prosperous Asian countries like China, rising fuel prices and the diversion of land from food crops to bio-fuel production.

The problem extends way beyond usual temporary production blips like the recent Australian drought, the volatility of soaring oil prices and a falling dollar, and could be severely compounded by climate change - with harsher droughts in some parts of the world and more severe flooding in others predicted.

In a worst case scenario not only could mortality and disease from malnutrition, already the underlying cause of an estimated 3.5 million child deaths each year, soar, but widespread social and political unrest might erupt. Food riots have already been reported in several countries and the World Bank estimates that 33 nations face potential social unrest.

“For these countries, where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption [spending], there is no margin for survival,” World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick told the Center for Global Development in Washington on 3 April, calling for a "new deal" combining hundreds of millions of additional dollars for immediate relief with long-term efforts to boost agricultural productivity in developing countries.

He announced that the Bank would nearly double agricultural assistance to US$800 million in Africa, adding: “We can help create a ‘Green Revolution’ for sub-Saharan Africa.”

Just last month the UN World Food Programme (WFP) issued an “extraordinary emergency appeal” to world government leaders, endorsed by Zoellick yesterday, for an additional $500 million over the $2.9 billion it sought a few months ago, just to feed the same 73 million people in 78 countries.

Policy questions

For some the World Bank’s “new deal,” which follows up on the conclusions of a report last year, has been too slow in coming. “The World Bank, I would say very belatedly, acknowledged the importance of the agricultural sector,” Tom Arnold, chief executive of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Concern Worldwide, which seeks to reduce suffering in the poorest countries, told IRIN.

“Immediately, there needs to be a recognition that if we are to have some kind of international safety net in place for the most vulnerable people on the planet, then responding positively to something like WFP is an important aspect,” he said.

“For the longer term, there are a lot of big policy questions that need to be addressed both nationally and internationally, such as taking agriculture more seriously in the economic sector... Any short-term measures to alleviate the problem have to go hand in hand with a serious and strategic commitment to promoting agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Other NGOs agree. “For the recent couple of decades donors, including countries like the United States, have been quite dramatically neglecting the agricultural sector, reducing their funding support for agricultural programmes,” Oxfam America Policy Director Gawain Kripke told IRIN.

“The food aid system is quite broken and needs reform, and urgently needs it, because dollars are being wasted quite dramatically. We need to be thinking about less short-term palliative responses and longer-term security responses,” he said.

Avoiding high transport costs

The NGO Action Against Hunger (AAH) calls for building capacity in Africa through access to credit, agricultural extension programmes and training, citing the continent’s untapped potential and the need to avoid the high transportation costs as oil prices soar.

“The transport costs associated with food aid could be better used to improve local production techniques and agricultural systems,” AAH Food Security Adviser Silke Pietzsch told IRIN.

Oxfam America’s Kripke cited US insistence that all US food aid be purchased in the US and shipped mostly on US-flagged carriers as a major barrier, greatly increasing costs and entailing delays of up to six months.

“The cost increment of doing it that way rather than buying food more flexibly for instance in Africa for distribution in Africa, can be 50 percent,” he said. “So we can get a lot more assistance from the same amount of money if the United States were to reform how it did its food assistance.”

GM crops

Siwa Msangi, research fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), believes bio-technology holds the solution and that genetically mutated crops need to be de-demonised.

“Biotechnologies can help us grow more drought-resistant, pest-resistant, disease-resistant traits in staple crops,” he told IRIN. This could counter climate change by, for example, producing submergence-resistant strains to withstand increased flooding.

“There are certain attitudes to technologies in food that I think we need to overcome through better education,” he said, citing the prejudices against so-called franken-foods and franken-fish and noting that farmers in Africa are afraid to use bio-technologies that might reduce their competitiveness on the European market due to attitudes there.

But for some there is at present no clear way ahead. Jim Bishop, president for Humanitarian Policy and Practice of InterAction, a US-based coalition of non-profit organisations, said US groups and international agencies like the WFP are still trying “to come to grips” with how to respond adequately.

“The longer term prospects are not terribly encouraging,” he told IRIN. “No one has come up with an agreed answer to the problem. There obviously isn’t a silver bullet, and there’ll be various views, and we hope that the international community will contribute additional resources.”

Bio-fuels and biotechnology

Nobel economics prize winner and former World Bank chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz sees bio-fuels as a major culprit. “The market has been distorted badly by some of the bio-fuel requirements,” he told IRIN. “The whole system is affected by this very large withdrawal of agricultural output that was going into food production.”

But this is where biotechnology could come to the rescue, according IFPRI’s Msangi. “We should be aiming for high yielding varieties both for food and for fuel as well,” he said, foreseeing a switch to grasses, and to using the stock instead of the grain of maize for fuel.

Meanwhile the immediate problem remains. Zoellick called for immediate action on WFP’s new appeal. “The United States, the European Union, Japan, and other OECD [the 30-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries must act now to fill this gap - or many more people will suffer and starve,” he warned.

USAID announced in February that its food aid costs had jumped 41 percent in the first half of the US 2008 financial year, swallowing $120 million.

Another donor, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), this fiscal year has already provided over $116 million to WFP. “The Government of Canada is concerned by the impact that the rising price of food commodities will have on the world’s vulnerable and hungry people,” CIDA spokeswoman Jo-Ann Purcell told IRIN. “We will continue to follow WFP needs closely and make every effort possible to respond to the increased demands for food aid.”

WFP continues to call attention to the plight of the one billion people who still live on less than $1 a day, the threshold defined by the international community as absolute poverty, below which survival is in question.

“The crunch means that families which may have had a bit of money to pay school fees for their children, to go to clinics when they are sick, or take much-needed nourishing food together with anti-retroviral drugs, will suffer as they will cut back in these areas,” it said in a recent update. “They will also start cutting meals and substituting less nutritious foods.”

ma/md/cb/bp http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77631DUBAI Thursday, April 03, 2008 (IRIN) - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given US$26.8 million to Cornell University in the USA for a new global project to fight wheat (stem) rust disease, which specialists say poses a threat to world food security.DUBAI Thursday, April 03, 2008 (IRIN) - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given US$26.8 million to Cornell University in the USA for a new global project to fight wheat (stem) rust disease, which specialists say poses a threat to world food security .

“International coordinated action is the only possible way to address problems of this magnitude. This project is a step towards re-invigorating and focusing such coordination,” Rick Ward, the project coordinator, told IRIN on 2 April.

According to a Cornell University press release, “the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project [launched on 2 April] will bring together 15 partner institutions to combat the emergence of deadly new variants of stem rust that can spread quickly, reducing healthy wheat to broken, shrivelled stems.”

Wheat represents about 30 percent of the global production of grain crops and, according UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projections, 598 million tonnes of wheat will be harvested in 2008 on 220 million hectares.

On average, each person in the world consumes 68.2 kilograms of wheat each year - about 630 calories per person per day, or between a third and a half of the minimal energy requirements of most adults.

As a result of crop shortfalls in major wheat producing countries, largely due to extreme weather events in 2007, global wheat stocks plummeted, and wheat prices quadrupled - in part also due to rising oil prices and the use of land for biofuels. Poor consumers in Africa, Asia and parts of the Middle East are particularly vulnerable to price increases. Africa imports over 80 percent of its wheat needs (about nine million tonnes a year) - and the gap is projected to increase steadily in the future.

According to the project document: “By using a very conservative estimate of 10 percent loss in regions hit by Ug99, annual global losses by the year 2016 are predicted at 25 million tonnes (equivalent to about $8.3 billion at today’s prices).” This has huge implications for the rural and urban poor for whom bread is a dietary staple.

The project’s largest target market are the 50 million wheat-farming families in the Indo-Gangetic plain who stand to lose over seven million tonnes of annual production ($2.3 billion) for each 10 percent drop in yield.

“The reality could be much more frightening since much higher losses are possible. Between Rabat and Vladivostok, there are over 100 million hectares of wheat under cultivation, all genetically susceptible to Ug99,” says the project document.

Improved wheat varieties

One way of combating stem rust is by using fungicides but these are expensive (estimated at $40 per crop cycle to protect one hectare in Kenya) and they can pose risks to human health and the environment, according to scientists.

The project will, therefore, develop improved rust-resistant wheat varieties to protect global wheat production from the new variants of stem rust disease which are evolving in east Africa. New derivatives of Ug99 were isolated in Njoro, Kenya, in 2006 and 2007, and it is hoped that these can help in the development of more resistant wheat strains, according to Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute are expected to be the key bodies to develop the new resistant varieties, in collaboration with scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT, in Mexico; the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), in Syria; and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.

There will also be input by FAO and advanced research laboratories in the USA, Canada, China, Australia and South Africa. A project management unit will be based at Cornell University under the direction of Ronnie Coffman, international professor of plant breeding at the university.

Travellers can spread Ug99

Stem rust Ug99 is migrating out of east Africa via airborne spores which can also be spread by international travellers on their clothing. A similar rapid spread by human transport has been documented for other plant diseases, including yellow rust (another wheat disease).

According to the project document, a limited number of stem rust resistant (Sr) genes from various wheat varieties, landraces (ancient varieties) and wild relatives are available to breeders. “Some of these sources of resistance are ‘minor’ genes that are additive and need to be deployed together in one variety to provide effective protection (also known as Adult Plant Resistance, APR),” says the document. Some elite high-yielding breeding lines with resistance are already being tested in several countries.

Scientists at the project say they will adopt multiple approaches to achieve long-lasting stem rust resistance, from “bread and butter” breeding, to marker assisted selection (MAS) and high-end basic science explorations.

ar/cb http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77586JOHANNESBURG Friday, March 28, 2008 (IRIN) - With no end in sight to rising global food prices, families across southern Africa are being forced to tighten their belts. JOHANNESBURG Friday, March 28, 2008 (IRIN) - With no end in sight to rising global food prices, families across southern Africa are being forced to tighten their belts.

“Everything is very expensive - we are now living on borrowed money,” Towela Ngwira, a shopper at a market in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, told IRIN. “For us it is no longer hand-to-mouth but hand-to-hand because all the money we get has to be given to someone else [from whom we borrowed].”

Ngwira, who takes care of four children, said she has had to make drastic changes to her household’s shopping basket. “We are now surviving on dry foods such as Kapenta [sardines], dry fish, and dry beans, because fresh foods are very expensive. We have even stopped buying bread for breakfast - it’s too expensive for us.”

According to André Jooste, senior manager of market and economic research at South Africa’s National Agricultural Marketing Council, although the poor are inevitably the hardest hit, even professional urbanites are beginning to feel the squeeze.

“[The] middle-class will start changing their buying patterns, moving away from special products to [cheaper] alternatives. They will have to,” he said. “Food prices will level off but will continue to experience upward pressure.”

This week South Africa, the regional economic giant, released figures showing the annual consumer price index for food, a measure of food price inflation, had increased to 14.1 percent.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the global picture is even bleaker: FAO’s global food price index rose 40 percent in 2007 compared to 9 percent in 2006.

Global economics

The causes are global. Worldwide food stocks have hit historic lows, while demand has never been higher. The combination has resulted in prices of basic staples such as wheat, corn and rice hitting record highs, up 50 percent or more in the past six months.

On the demand side, population growth and economic success in developing countries, particularly China and India, have drastically increased disposable incomes. The effects have been an overall increase in demand and “peoples diets are changing – demanding more meat and dairy products,” which are more resource intensive to produce than the traditional staple of the poor, Jooste explained.

Major weather related phenomenon such as cyclones, droughts and flooding have ravaged harvests in key producing countries throughout the world meaning supply has dropped. And the advent of the biofuel industry has seen more and more agricultural land being set aside for bio-ethanol production.

Local problems

In Malawi’s southern town of Zomba, Harrison Kumwenda has seen the produce from his one and a half acre plot fall by more than half. He blames a combination of expensive fertiliser, and the weather. His district received abnormally high rainfall from November to February, “which resulted in floods washing away our crops.”

In a good year Kumwenda would harvest around 15 50-kg bags of maize. But, “I have a wife and three children and we would need up to 30 bags to get to the next growing season”, he explained. The deficit would traditionally be made up by seasonal wage labour.

“We were buying a bag of 50kg of maize at the price of K800 (US$ 5.8) in December but the vendors are selling a bag of 50kg at K3,000 (US$ 22) which is very high”.

Malawi met its own food needs for the first time in years in 2006, followed by a bumper harvest in 2007. But even though the country is expecting a surplus for 2008, pockets of food security will remain.

No sharing in tough times

Poor regional infrastructure and unprecedented high prices for fuel have made transport between surplus and deficit areas unprofitable, Jooste commented. After successive years of poor harvests across the region, government’s are now more inclined to build domestic food reserves rather than export.

In Zambia, the authorities “have decided to restrict the export of maize only to countries that have active contracts with us until we ascertain the quantity of maize stocks in the country,” Sara Sayifwanda, Zambia’s minister of agriculture, told IRIN.

“It is important for us to take precautions because we don’t know [as yet] how exactly this harvest season will be; we may have maize shortages in certain places.”

Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Angola, Malawi – and especially Mozambique – were badly hit by flooding this season, which according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, affected close to 1 million people.

Peter Cottan, vice president of the Millers Association of Zambia, said some millers had started hoarding their maize stocks in anticipation of a shortage. “We expect the prices to even go higher,” he said.

The Basic Needs Basket, an index of market prices compiled monthly by a local faith-based think-tank, the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflections (JCTR) in Zambia, has shown an unprecedented increase in the cost of basic food items: the average monthly cost rose by 10 percent from January to February.

“The obvious and common underlying factor... has to do with how much is available on the market,” JCTR spokesperson, Miniva Chibuye, explained. “The current upward trends in food prices pose serious challenges to human development and require that strategic planning and responses begin now.”

tdm/oahttp://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77505DUBAI Thursday, March 27, 2008 (IRIN) - The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.DUBAI Thursday, March 27, 2008 (IRIN) - The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.

Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), was quoted in a 20 March ICARDA press release as saying that he and his fellow scientists were convinced that Ug99 would quickly spread beyond Iran and that, with the long distance travel of rust spores, Ug99 would soon affect farms in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia.

Richard Brettell, director of the Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management Programme at ICARDA, told IRIN on 26 March that halting the spread of the stem rust spores is difficult since they are dispersed by the wind. “The fungus can to some extent be controlled by the application of fungicides [as a spray]; however, these need to be applied at an early stage of infection before the disease takes hold,” he said.

Brettell said the most effective way of controlling the disease is to grow resistant varieties. But he warned: “The problem is that almost all the wheat varieties grown in West and South Asia are known to be susceptible to Ug99. It will take time and coordination to replace them with resistant varieties.”

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in early March that the major wheat-producing countries to the east of Iran should be on high alert. Other areas likely to be affected include the Mediterranean region, north Africa, southern Europe, eastern Europe and Russia.

According to ICARDA, sporadic epidemics of stem rust, also known as black rust, have plagued wheat production before. It cites an outbreak of the disease in North America in the 1950s which destroyed up to 40 percent of the spring wheat crop. Since the discovery of Ug99 in Uganda in 1999, the fungus has infected crops in north and east African countries and in early 2006 it was found in Yemen as had been predicted based on earlier movements of yellow rust.

New variant

Brettell said the pathogen had moved faster than anticipated because it had been able to take a hold on susceptible wheat varieties grown in the Arabian peninsula. “These provided a bridge for it to jump to Iran, most likely being blown by prevailing winds,” Brettell said.

Before its appearance in Iran, a country with six million hectares of wheat, stem rust had seriously affected wheat production in Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen. ICARDA’s Solh said that since the pathogen was moving faster than anticipated, surveillance, monitoring and tracking of this new strain was essential for control of the disease.

Brettell explained why Ug99 had defeated varieties that had been resistant to stem rust in the past: The rust fungus had a capacity to mutate and take on new virulence, in a similar way to other pathogens, such as the influenza virus for animals (including birds) and humans. “Ug99 is a new variant of the wheat stem rust pathogen… The problem arises because this new variant has overcome the resistance bred into many of the world’s wheat varieties,” he said.

Standardised tracking

Following the detection of the fungus in Iran, a two-day Stem Rust Baseline Survey Workshop on Standardising Protocols and International Collaboration was held at ICARDA, Aleppo, Syria, on 10-11 March. It was jointly organised by ICARDA, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), FAO and Cornell University, under the Borlaug Global Rust initiative.

The purpose of the meeting was to standardise methods for surveying and tracking the spread of stem rust Ug99, as well as to strengthen international collaboration to combat it.

This, said Brettell, was achieved by bringing together about 49 scientists and researchers from the national agricultural research institutes of Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay and Yemen. A number of international research institutes also attended the workshop.

Global effort

ICARDA is putting much emphasis on international cooperation and sharing of knowledge, saying that the fight against Ug99 must be a global effort.

A Global Rust Initiative (GRI) was launched in 2005, and both ICARDA and CIMMYT have been working closely with the US Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Canada, FAO and other national and international organisations to limit the spread of Ug99.

Both ICARDA and CIMMYT have identified resistant wheat varieties, and these are currently under evaluation in national agricultural systems around the world, according to Brettell.

In October 2007 scientists and researchers met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and established an early warning system to check the spread of stem rust. A survey system was then set up that would help researchers track and identify the spread of the fungus.

ICARDA, established in 1977, is one of 15 international research centres supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. ICARDA serves the entire developing world for the improvement of barley, lentils, and faba (broad) beans; and dry-area developing countries for the on-farm management of water, improvement of nutrition and productivity of small ruminants (sheep and goats), and the rehabilitation and management of rangelands. In the central and west Asia and north Africa regions, ICARDA is responsible for the improvement of durum and bread wheat, chickpeas, pasture and forage legumes and farming systems; and for the protection and enhancement of the natural resource base of water, land and biodiversity.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a strategic alliance of countries, international and regional organisations, and private foundations supporting 15 international research centres that mobilise cutting-edge science to promote sustainable development by reducing hunger and poverty, improving human nutrition and health, and protecting the environment.

ar/cb http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77474JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, March 05, 2008 (IRIN) - As food prices hit record highs, analysts warn that a re-think of food aid strategies is needed - and Ethiopia, a traditionally food insecure country, could offer some answers.JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, March 05, 2008 (IRIN) - As food prices hit record highs, analysts warn that a re-think of food aid strategies is needed - and Ethiopia, a traditionally food insecure country, could offer some answers.

Globally, the World Food Programme's (WFP) operational budget for 2008 has now risen to $3.4 billion - "an increase of $500 million to account for the increased price of food and transport alone," said WFP spokesman Robin Lodge. "This budget is just to cover our current assessed needs, and leaves nothing for unforeseen emergencies or the huge number of people who are now falling into the hunger trap as a result of the rising prices."

Food prices are expected to continue to rise for the forseeable future as a result of surging global demand and reduced cereal stocks, partly on account of biofuel. Edward Clay, senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute, a UK-based think-tank, remarked that the situation called for a major re-think of food aid.

"Globalisation now means that the poor everywhere are affected. There is a need to ask how to anticipate a potentially much more volatile world food economy and this may require different institutional arrangements," he suggested. "How do we ensure that poor people and indeed poorer countries are not crowded out of world food markets?"

Food aid agencies have limited options, but the answer lies perhaps in Ethiopia, said Marc Cohen, research fellow at the US-based International food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Shukri Ahmed, Senior Economist at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). "Ethiopia, which now has several million people in need of food assistance, has taken steps to emerge from aid dependency," Ahmed commented.

Among these was attempting to differentiate between people facing chronic food insecurity - currently estimated at more than eight million - and people facing either transitory or acute food insecurity - estimated between one to two million. Such a classification lent itself to providing a better response to food insecurity and targeting increasingly scarce food aid resources more effectively.

As part of a federal Food Security Programme (FSP), Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) provides a combination of cash, farming inputs and food to the vulnerable and chronically food insecure, while the Emergency Food Security Reserve (EFSR) holds more than 400,000 metric tonnes of food available for aid agencies to borrow from in case of emergencies.

Ethiopia's past response

Five major droughts in two decades have left most Ethiopian households reeling, and hundreds of thousands of people still live on the brink of survival. Ethiopia's PSNP arose partly out of concern by the government and the donor community that emergency appeals were regularly falling short of their targets, or providing late and erratic support, according to the Human Development Report 2007/2008 by the UN Development Programme.

"For poor households, delayed support during a prolonged drought can have devastating consequences in both the short and longer term. In 1983-1984 it led to the death of thousands of vulnerable people [in Ethiopia]," the report pointed out.

The PSNP is a multiyear arrangement that started by assisting five million people in 2005 and intends covering eight million by 2009. It has widely been punted by the relief community as a model for building resilience to face climatic shocks.

The EFSR, set up in 1982 "to ensure people did not have to wait for food aid to arrive," said Ahmed, is managed by the government and aid agencies in a transparent manner: aid agencies can borrow from the reserve on condition that they replenish it within a certain timeframe.

"Until the late 1980s the grain reserves in several countries of sub-Saharan Africa were strictly regulated by government, with a strong bias towards the politically more active urban population," Ahmed remarked.

"Low consumer prices were maintained by a combination of low producer prices and heavy subsidies ... Parastatal companies or marketing boards with monopoly rights for the marketing of designated cereals - and, in some instances, the provision of inputs - were established to administer the system."

However, governments could not always provide the parastatals with adequate funds to finance their operations, which often led to reserve stocks being used for normal market operations. "Financial pressures on both governments and the parastatals resulted in insufficient resources being made available to replenish the reserve stocks at the start of the following marketing year," Ahmed said.

"At the same time, the donor community, which was facing increasing demands for food aid, was becoming steadily more disenchanted with the way that reserves stocks were being used, and was increasingly unwilling to provide the resources necessary for rebuilding stocks," he added.

"Progressively, the quantities held in reserves dwindled, eventually ceasing to exist in most countries. Thus, for many countries the strategic grain reserve, while continuing to form an integral part of the government's food security programme, tended to exist in theory rather than in practice."

IFPRI's Cohen said resource pooling - regionally or nationally - was the future of food aid. "Countries have to strengthen their disaster preparedness and become more self-reliant, as Ethiopia has developed its Disaster Preparedness and Prevention Agency and so has Bangladesh. The UN and other aid agencies can continue to provide them with support in developing capacity."

Shahidur Rashid, an IFPRI research fellow based in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, was more cautious: "I think [food aid dependent countries] taking control [of their response to food aid needs] is a rather strong statement.

"A high incidence of poverty, weak infrastructure and institutions, and limited ability to invest indicate that Ethiopia (and many other developing countries) will need aid to support anti-poverty programmes. The challenges are using the aid effectively and, along with economic growth, reducing aid dependency in the future."

Ethiopia is among the poorest countries in the world. Its agricultural sector accounts for about 40 percent of national gross domestic product (GDP), 90 percent of exports, 85 percent of employment, and 90 percent of the poor, according a recent paper by the World Bank's Derek Byerlee and Madhur Gautam, IFPRI's David Spielman, and Dawit Alemu of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research.

"Rural poverty is further compounded by extreme land shortages in the highlands - per capita land area has fallen from 0.5ha in the 1960s to only 0.2ha by 2005," the authors pointed out.

Response to price rise

The Ethiopian government has announced a temporary freeze on WFP's local purchases of food for emergency interventions, among other measures to counter high and still rising domestic food prices. The government also banned exports of the main cereals and grain stockpiling, and a temporary 10 percent surtax on luxury imports has also been imposed to help fund wheat subsidies for the poor.

WFP began buying food in Ethiopia in the mid-1990s on the invitation of the government, to help firm up prices, "which tended to fall drastically at harvest time, resulting in farmers often receiving prices which were incredibly low, as farmers were under pressure to dispose of their commodities to meet urgent cash requirements," said Simon Denhere, WFP Ethiopia Procurement Officer.

He brushed aside any assumption that WFP had been prevented from buying locally because its purchases had affected food prices. "WFP's procurement policy is that local purchase will only be implemented where there are marketable surpluses, to the extent that WFP purchases should not have a negative impact on the market, WFP should be a 'residual buyer', so to speak," he explained. Besides, WFP was not the largest buyer, Denhere added.

Role of aid agencies in the future

As countries develop, "food aid agencies should gradually go out of business," commented Rashid. He cited India, where the scale of food aid has declined significantly as the country developed its own ability to invest and implement anti-poverty and social safety net programmes. But Ethiopia's PSNP still depends on several aid agencies, "and I don't see Ethiopia, and many other developing countries, break free from such supports in the near future."

WFP's Denhere suggested that the Ethiopian government needed to invest in the supply side of agriculture. "Recent policies have been targeted at the demand side and price controls, often curtailing the activities of traders and buyers and market improvements.

"If WFP were to leave Ethiopia, beneficiaries who have no capacity to enter the market will be worst affected, as they will have no fallback position ... owing to the levels of poverty in the country, many families could face probable starvation."

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