The Guardian 23 July, 2008
World Food Summit:
Small voice, strong message
Anna Pha
"In large events such as this, small islands often feel overwhelmed and even over-looked", said Masao Nakayama. Nakayama was addressing the United Nations conference on Food Security, Challenges of Climate Change and Bio-energy in Rome last month as a representative of the Federated States of Micronesia.
"On most of our larger islands visitors are greeted by the cascade of greenery, the splash of diverse traditional food crops and the relative plumpness and happiness of our younger people. However, that image is misleading for beneath the waving palm trees our people feel the harsh pinch of rising food prices and they have growing concerns about how they will eat in the future.
"For Micronesia, the food security problem is not just about the current increase in basic food prices. It is also about the chronic, long-term crisis of structural food insecurity and about increasing unhealthiness of our people due largely to the flood of imports of more convenient, cheaper foods with low nutritional value", the Micronesian representative said.
"This food security problem has been brewing over the past 120 years since the modern colonial era. In that time colonial values and economic interests, modern-lifestyles, promotion of trade in non-food crops, and the lower relative cost of imported food items, have led to significant social and production changes in our society….
"As a result, traditional systems and cultural values of sustainable food cultivation, storage, and preparation have been lost. To revive and extend these systems will required time and resources, access to improved planting materials, and education of consumers."
Climate change
As for the options facing Micronesia, "we propose that our future be informed and guided by our past. Our ancestors had to be self-sustaining within isolated and fragile ecosystems. That was the only way that they could survive in the days before modern transportation. Their traditional agriculture methods were developed in ways that were environmentally sound, while food distribution and preparation practices were communally responsible….
"The Micronesian leadership is strongly committed to restore traditional food crops and production systems to their vitality and role in preserving the health and security of the community. … We ask that outside nations and international institutions help us in that process.
"… for our small coral atolls the food security issue is part of the very literal drowning of some of our islands.
"The rising sea-levels have caused two gardens to be flooded and destroyed beyond rehabilitation, washed away or permanently inundated scarce land, and have stunted and undermined the coconut trees that have for generations anchored the island sands on top of the ocean and nourished and sheltered the atoll people.
"Elsewhere in the Pacific, some atoll islands are already being evacuated because they no longer produce sufficient food to support their inhabitants due to crop damage from seawater."
This issue was also raised by Tuvalu’s Director of Agriculture, Itaia Lausaveve. Tuvalu is extremely vulnerable to climate change, its atoll of small island states are low lying islands with limited land, poor soils and limited diversity of crops.
He told an all too familiar story: "Our own local food production has been declining as they are no longer competitive to the cheaper food imports that we have become so dependent on within the last decade. Some of these imported foods, particularly rice, flour and sugar have become our new staple foods."
"The impacts of climate change in our low lying country is already happening and is affecting our traditional agriculture where over 60% of our population in rural communities and outer islands depend for their food security. Each year we lose many coconut trees on our shore lines because of tidal erosion from sea level rise.
"Our back yard food gardens in low lying grounds are becoming more commonly inundated during particular high tides of the year …" There has been a slow increase in the frequency of tropical cyclones, warming seas are bleaching the coral and affecting food from marine sources.
The government has been working on renewable energy for ten years but to take it further needs further technical and financial assistance.
Itaia Lausaveve summed up the sentiments of many of the poorer countries when he pointed out that it is the industrialised countries have made the major contribution towards climate change, not Tuvalu and other island countries in the Pacific. They have also played the major role in the rise in food prices.
Therefore the industrialised countries "should share in resolving these problems by increasing their financial and technical assistance to the impacted and vulnerable developing countries in their food security programs that they have identified regionally and nationally."
Priorities shift to rural sector
Twenty-five years ago, Africa still had a surplus in food production, including cereals and rice, which it could export. "In the ’60s Madagascar was a rice exporting country. This is not the case today", said Marc S E Ravalomanana, President of the Republic of Madagascar. Africa now imports more food from Europe and north America than it exports to them.
The government is now placing emphasis on developing the rural sector, with the aim of building the economy from the ground up by processing (adding value to) its raw products. It talks in terms of a Green Revolution.
The government liberalised the price of rice, as an incentive to peasants, along with a program for micro-credit and improvements in rural infrastructure.
In two years time, Madagascar will become a net exporter of rice, and they hope to build reserves for the most vulnerable. This would in effect give the government some control over the impact of price rises.
The government is also setting up an institute for peasants with information centres in all 22 regions of the country. It is also working on the improvement of irrigation, and other infrastructure.
Madagascar rejects the replacement of food crops by plants to be used for the production of bio-energy. They are growing Jatropha on land which is not used for food.
Agricultural assistance
"No people can assume its destiny without freeing itself from food assistance," Maitre Abdoulaye Wade, the President of the Republic of Senegal, told the conference.
"Food assistance, generates a dependency link that always increases the need of assistance without providing a durable and trustworthy response to fundamental problems.
"The sustainable solution to this current crisis lays rather in food self-sufficiency by a return to the land. Therefore we must encourage long term actions based on assistance to agriculture."
The government has launched a plan called the Great Agricultural Offensive for Food and Abundance with the aim of producing large quantities of diverse varieties of staple food and other crops as well as the modernisation of livestock.
The Great Agricultural Offensive includes an irrigation program for 240,000 hectares to cover their needs in rice, which presently cost US$350 million a year to import.
"It is about a new type of partnership through which equipment and other agricultural inputs like fertilisers, irrigation equipment, drilled water, power generators, seeds and the necessary technical assistance are provided to young people in villages."
Great Green Wall
The sahelo-saharan states have launched the Great Green Wall project within the framework of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development* (NEPAD). The project involves planting a five kilometre wide strip of trees over a distance of 7,000 km from Dakar to Djibouti, across the desert, to prevent further desertification. Dakar to Djibouti stretches from the Gulf of Aden on the east coast of Africa right across the sahelo-saharan states to Senegal on the west coast.
"With the regeneration of biodiversity, we plan to give our planet a new "green lung" and contribute thus to the fight against climatic changes", the Senegal representative said.
The tree varieties have already been selected, in accordance with the climatic zones and each country is responsible for the Green Wall within its own borders.
There are plans to build water capture basins alongside the Green Wall. "The process consists in collecting rain water during the rainy season at the lowest point of each village by compacting the ground as a basin.
"Every year during the rainy season we loose important quantities of water by evaporation, infiltration underground or running off to the ocean.
"With water capture basins these resources are valorised to enable farmers in rural areas to grow food all year long, develop fish farming and satisfy their nutritional needs and even export market garden produces", Wade said.
His government believes that Africa "with its unexploited huge land resources … can at the same time be a bread basket and a reservoir for biofuel." Plants like Jartropha which can be used for biofuel grow wild in Senegal.
The success or failure of many of these programs rests on the political will of the higher income nations, to what extent they are willing to give the assistance, financial and technical, that is needed to develop food security and self-sufficiency. If Western nations continue to focus on food aid and the profit-making activity of corporations out of aid, then the struggle for the fundamental human right of food security will take much longer.
*The 37th Summit of the Organisation for African Unity in July 2001 formally adopted the strategic framework document for NEPAD which provides the basis for integrated socio-economic development for Africa. The five initiating states were Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. The eight priority areas of NEPAD are: political, economic and corporate governance; agriculture; infrastructure; education; health; science and technology; market access and tourism; and the environment.
**The Community of Sahelo-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) is an African inter-governmental organisation covering 16 African countries. The treaty establishing CEN-SAD stresses the importance of investment in education, culture and the environment.