'Perfect storm' looms for world's food supplies

Richard Ingham Yahoo News 31 May 11;

PARIS (AFP) – Oxfam called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the world's food system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and climate-hit harvests.

A "broken food system" means that the price of some staples will more than double by 2030, battering the world's poorest people, who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, the British-based aid group predicted.

"The food system is buckling under intense pressure from climate change, ecological degradation, population growth, rising energy prices, rising demand for meat and dairy products and competition for land from biofuels, industry, and urbanization," Oxfam said in a report.

It added: "The international community is sleepwalking into an unprecedented and avoidable human development reversal."

Noting that some 900 million people experience hunger today, Oxfam said the tally of misery could rise still further when a "perfect storm" struck a few decades from now.

By 2050, the world's population was expected to rise by a third, from 6.9 billion today to 9.1 billion. Demand for food would rise even higher, by 70 percent, as more prosperous economies demanded more calories.

But by this time, climate change will have started to bite, with drought, flood and storms affecting crop yields that, after the "green revolution" of the 1960s, had already begun to flatline in the early 1990s.

The price of staple foods such as corn, also known as maize, which has already hit record peaks, will more than double in the next 20 years, it predicted.

"In this new age of crisis, as climate impacts become increasingly severe and fertile land and fresh water supplies become increasingly scarce, feeding the world will get harder still," Oxfam chief Jeremy Hobbs said.

The report, Growing a Better Future, trails a campaign for reform that Oxfam is launching in 45 countries, supported by former Brazilian president Lula Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu and actress Scarlett Johansson.

Solutions envisaged by Oxfam focus on cutting out waste, especially of water, and to encourage the growing of food in a sustainable way.

The "Western" lifestyle -- characterised by over consumption and emphasis on beef and dairy which kilo for kilo (pound for pound) use up far more natural resources than cereals -- is given a hammering.

"In more than half of industrialized countries, 50 per cent or more of the population is overweight, and the amount of food wasted by consumers is enormous -- quite possibly as much 25 per cent," said Oxfam.

The report also calls for prising open closed markets and ending the domination of commodities and seeds trade by a handful of large corporations.

Small farms -- traditionally dismissed as a hindrance to food productivity -- could in fact drive the renaissance in yield with the help of investment, infrastructure and market access, it argued.

Just as important, said the report, is to set up new global governance to tackle food crises, including the creation of a multilateral food bank.

"During the 2008 food price crisis, cooperation was nowhere to be seen," lamented the report, saying the disarray ignited a "grab" for agricultural land in Africa by parched countries in the Gulf and elsewhere.

"Governments were unable to agree on the causes of the price rises, let alone how to respond. Food reserves had been allowed to collapse to historic lows," it said.

"Existing international institutions and forums were rendered impotent as more than 30 countries imposed export bans in a negative-sum game of beggar-thy-neighbour policy making."

Food Prices, Global Hunger to Skyrocket by 2030, Oxfam Warns
Natalie Wolchover LiveScience.com Yahoo News 31 May 11;

Left unchecked, climate change aligned with population explosion and low agricultural yields will drastically increase global poverty and hunger over the next two decades, warns the international aid organization Oxfam in a report released today (May 31).

The prices of staple foods such as corn and rice will speed up their ascent, Oxfam predicts, and will climb by 180 percent and 130 percent, respectively, by the year 2030.

In a world where the poorest people now spend as much as 80 percent of their incomes on food — the average Filipino spends proportionally four times more on sustenance than the average British person, for example — drastic food scarcities and price hikes will likely push many struggling populations into hunger and, potentially, starvation.

In its new report, Growing a Better Future, Oxfam says current trends indicate that the world's population will reach 9 billion by mid-century; meanwhile, the average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990. Left unchecked, the gap between food demand and supply will continue to widen.

"The food system must be transformed. By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet and demand for food will have increased by 70 percent. This demand must be met despite flatlining yields, increasing water scarcity, and growing competition over land. And agriculture must rapidly adapt to a changing climate and slash its carbon footprint," wrote Robert Bailey, Oxfam's senior climate advisor, in the report.

Climate change has already driven up food prices in many areas by causing drought and desertification, Oxfam reports, and of all the factors contributing to rising food prices, it will create the most serious impact of all in the coming decades.

"The impact of climate change on food prices is clearly closely linked to the impacts that climate change will have on crop production," Bailey wrote. Rice crop yields decline by an estimated 10 percent for every 1 degree-Celsius rise in dry-season minimum temperature, for example.

Aside from raising global temperatures, climate change "will increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts and floods which can wipe out harvests at a stroke," the report states.

Fixing the system

Global poverty is fueled by a broken system in which wealthy countries take advantage of the poor, Oxfam states. To curb the problem, the international community must address "the appalling inequities which plague the food system from farm to fork. We produce more food than we need. In the rich world, we throw much of it away. In the developing world, nearly one billion of us go without."

Industrialized countries must initiate major policy changes in order to fix the broken system, Oxfam continues. They must redirect tax breaks toward clean energy initiatives and place taxes on greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, "we must manage trade to manage risk by building a system of food reserves; increasing transparency in commodities markets; setting rules on export restrictions; and finally putting an end to trade-distorting agricultural subsidies."

The new report points to examples of the changes that must be undertaken to curb global poverty and hunger. In Brazil, social activism has led to agricultural policies that decreased hunger by one-third between 2000 and 2007. Vietnam achieved comparable results through land reform and a program of investment in smallholder agriculture — single-family farming.

"Thankfully, the vast transformation needed is already under way – led by individuals, organizations and movements who have taken the future into their own hands," the report states.

Hunger Crisis Worsens, Food System Broken: Oxfam
David Brough PlanetArk 1 Jun 11;

Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand will soar as the world struggles to raise output via a failing system, international charity Oxfam said on Tuesday, warning of worsening global hunger.

"The food system is pretty well bust in the world," Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

"All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up," Stocking said.

Hunger was increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes fueled by speculators, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change, Oxfam said.

Food prices are forecast to increase by something in the range of 70 to 90 percent in real terms by 2030 before taking into account the effects of climate change, which would roughly double price rises again, Oxfam said.

Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of the statistics division of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said he broadly agreed with the message of the Oxfam report but disagreed with Oxfam's long term food price forecast.

"I would not think that food prices would rise rapidly in real terms if there were no real increase in oil prices," Rome-based Schmidhuber said.

"I wouldn't say that our food system is broken. The world will always be able to produce enough food." Wheat prices have been largely flat so far in 2011 although they remain more than 70 percent above levels traded a year ago after rising sharply last summer as the worst drought in decades devastated crops in the Black Sea region.

Prices for corn have more than doubled in the last 12 months with global production unable to keep pace with record demand driven partly by the growth of the U.S. ethanol industry.

The United Nations last month reported food prices were just below record highs after 8 months of rises and in March warned that further oil price spikes and stockpiling by importers keen to head off unrest would hit volatile cereal markets.

Oxfam warned that by 2050 demand for food will rise by 70 percent yet the world's capacity to increase production is declining.

YIELD GROWTH FALLING

The average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990 and is set to decline to a fraction of one percent in the next decade while increasing regional and local crises could double the need for food aid in the next 10 years.

"Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion," Oxfam said in a report.

"The world's poorest people, who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, will be hit hardest."

Entitled "Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World," the report said: "The scale of the challenge is unprecedented, but so is the prize: a sustainable future in which everyone has enough to eat."

Oxfam believes one way to tame food price inflation is to limit speculation in agricultural commodity futures markets. It also opposed support for using food as a feedstock for biofuels.

"Financial speculation must be regulated, and support dismantled for biofuels that displace food," it said.

Stocking said she favored the introduction by regulators of position limits in agricultural commodities futures trading, noting that financial speculation aggravated price volatility.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has campaigned for tough measures to limit speculation and is due to use his platform as president of the world's 20 top economies (G20) to push for more regulation this month.

Fighting poverty is the key to relieving hunger, said Martin Mortimer, director of the University of Liverpool's Food Security Network.

"This report from Oxfam re-emphasizes the need to address food security in the context of poverty alleviation," he said. The report said the shortcomings of the food system flowed from failures of government to regulate and to invest, which meant that companies, interest groups and elites had been able to plunder resources.

(Editing by Keiron Henderson)