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ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

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The headline of this article makes it seem as though the tried-and-tested initiatives listed in the book were a sort of '20 easy tips to get out of the crisis', when in fact, they are not. For the simple reason that carrying them out and keeping them going require a great measure of political will and a prudent investment of material resources, without which, of course, no meaningful social program is possible.


On the eve of UN food summit:
20 best ways to feed the hungry

By Howard LaFranchi, Staff Writer

November 15, 2009


Washington - On the eve of a world food summit that will acknowledge 100 million additional hungry mouths in the world since last year, a new study chronicles 20 good ideas that have helped feed millions of people.

The initiatives range from milk cooperatives among women farmers in India to land reform in China, and they demonstrate what it takes to boost food production.

The 20 initiatives are showcased in a report titled "Millions Fed" by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington. It will be presented at this week's three-day world food summit in Rome, which starts Monday.





The search for the Oscars of food-production success resulted from frustration. Much of the focus on the 2008 food crisis has been on what went wrong. But people at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded the study, "were thinking about successes, not failure," says IFPRI director Joachim von Braun.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, which is hosting next week's summit, says the number of hungry people has topped 1 billion for the first time since global hunger estimates were first made in 1970.

But David Spielman, a research fellow with IFPRI's regional team in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has another way of looking at that statistic: roughly 1 billion people were hungry in the late 1950s, when that number constituted about one-third of the world's population.

"The world's population has doubled since the 1950s, and today more than 5 billion people are food secure," Mr. Spielman says.

That's actually significant progress, he adds, but "the successes have been overshadowed by the doom and gloom."

The "Millions Fed" study goes beyond listing successes to detailing why and how each case was successful.

China's land-tenure reform has perhaps had more impact on food production than any initiative in history, IFPRI says. It worked in part because it gave millions of peasants the incentive to produce.

Other projects were successes because they teamed increased production with infrastructure and marketing improvements.

The findings may be a bright spot at a world food summit that is already mired in disputes over targets for agriculture investment and ending global hunger. A draft declaration had called for eradicating hunger by 2025, but some delegations balked. They said an existing UN target of halving hunger by 2015 is already falling out of reach.

Many food-production experts concur that food security won't be substantially addressed until developing countries increase both agricultural aid and investment in the farm sector.

But a commitment to increasing the percentage of international aid that goes to agricultural development – bringing it to 1980 levels – has also been watered down. The draft text now calls for increasing agriculture's share of aid without setting any target amount.

The "Millions Fed" report is really a study of the link between agricultural investment and food production, says Prabhu Pingali of the Gates Foundation. Yet "despite the proven successes," he says surprisingly little attention is given to the role of investment in agriculture.

"When people meet in Rome," Mr. Pingali says, they may wonder "why are we talking about investment in agriculture. This book gets beyond the why to the how – to what works and doesn't work."


The entire book is available online and may be downloaded in PDF:
www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/oc64.pdf


If I had any opportunity to do it at all, I would go into a third career getting involved some way in developing and promoting a food program in the neediest areas.

As a Filipino, I have vivid memories of how the Green Revolution came to the Philippines, with the establishment of the International Rise Research Institute (IRRI) in 1960 in conjunction with the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines (my Alma Mater) in its campus about 30 miles outside Manila.

By 1965, new high-yield, high-resistance varieties of rice introduced throughout the Philippines and much of Asia began to improve rice production dramatically, so that we stopped having to import rice at all. Both when I was at university and as a journalist, I had occasion to visit IRRI headquarters periodically to keep abreast of what they were doing.

IRRI statistics show that in the past 50 years, the increased production made possible by the new rice varieties has resulted in a spectacular drop in the real price of rice, bringing great relief to the poor.

IRRI, originally funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, is now funded by the Word Bank, the FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. It now has offices in 14 other countries of Asia and Africa.

Rice is the major food for almost half of the world's population and requires much less processing than wheat, the other main staple. Milled rice (unhusked) is ready to cook and eat, whereas wheat has to be further ground into flour, and the flour then made into bread or noodles.

The 'Tilapia Revolution', one of the 20 successful strategies mentioned, was just as exciting. Tilapia can be raised on fish farms, in artificial fresh water ponds. I remember a time when it was very 'in' to raise your own tilapia in a home pond. It is an excellent fish, very fleshy, not spiny, and very flavorful any way you cook it.




[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/11/2009 01:54]
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