Today is World Food Day. There are 967 million people living below the hunger line.

In one of DFID’s splendid new blogs, Howard Taylor, Head of DFID Ethiopia , emphasizes the need for greater agricultural production:

In the long-term, development assistance needs to prioritise agricultural growth and productivty, if we’re to make sure that in years to come everyone, no matter where they live, has enough to eat. In a nutshell, that’s what World Food Day is all about.

Today is a good day to remember Amartya Sen’s book Poverty and Famines, which was written partly about the the Ethiopian famine of 1972-74, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  It begins with this profound observation:

Starvation is characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes.

This is a thought of enormous importance.  For most of the 967 million people who are hungry, the problem is NOT that there is not enough food, it is that they are too poor to buy it.

We should be cautious about pursuing a policy focused on increasing food production.  Our goal should be to increase the incomes and wealth of those who currently live in hunger and other forms of extreme poverty, so that they can exercise entitlement to the food and other things they need.  Increasing agricultural productivity is one way to improve the incomes of the rural poor, but it is not necessarily the best way, and so it may not be the way of reducing hunger.

Update: more here.

About 12-13 million Ethiopians need food relief or emergency assistance as a result of the failure of the short rains in southern Ethiopia, according to AFP:

The lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age five at risk from malnutrition, OCHA said. …

The United Nations appealed in June for 325.2 million dollars mainly for drought victims . Only 52 percent of the appeal has been met.

I don’t understand how this can happen. We presumably knew - or could have known - in April that the short rains had failed, and that there would be hunger in southern Ethiopia. So how is it that we find ourselves in September - at least 4 full months later - and we’ve only raised half the money we need to prevent people from dying of hunger?

I am told that the food shortages were accurately predicted by the experts as early as May. But this predictions don’t translate into political pressure, and thus funding, until there are pictures on TV of children with distended bellies and flies on their face.

So the question for the future is: how can we translate warnings about food shortages into a flow of the necessary resources without having to wait for people to start to die?

Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa.

The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of the market for GM technology, the pace of research has slowed. GM research takes a long time to come to fruition, and its core benefit - the permanent reduction of global food prices - cannot fully be captured through patents. European governments should be funding this research, but it is entirely reliant on the private sector. Private money for research depends on the prospect of sales, so the ban has not only blocked public research - it has reduced private research. …

…. It is conventional to say that Africa needs a green revolution. The reality is that the green revolution was based on chemical fertilisers, and even when fertiliser was cheap, Africa did not adopt it. With the rise in fertiliser costs as a byproduct of high energy prices, any green revolution will perforce not be chemical. What African agriculture needs is a biological revolution. This is what GM offers, if only sufficient money is put into research. There has as yet been no work on the crops specific to the region, such as cassava and yams.

Mainstream scientists have responded to Priince Charles that GM offers the opportunity to redistribute wealth to feed the poor. With the right investments in technology, Africa could not only feed itself, it could be a major food producer for the rest of the world. GM corn in Africa produces four times as much corn per acre (and the corn can be protected from witchweed, unlike the previous varieties).

I’ve been puzzling for a while about why food prices are rising here in Ethiopia. Teff, the local grain, has trebled in price from about 400 Birr per quintal to about 1,200 Birr for the same amount. There is almost no global trade in teff, so it does not seem to be an effect of rising global teff prices. Teff production has been at high levels for four years, according to Ethiopian government statistics (which may be inaccurate); and there is no obvious reason why overall food demand should have increased enough to cause such a sharp increase in prices.

A few weeks ago, Javier Blas in the FT, offered one possible explanation. He said that the problem was abnormally high demand, driven by substitution effects:

United Nations’ agriculture and food aid officials said that record prices of imported food have prompted a substitution effect, boosting the demand - and the price - of indigenous staples such as yam, sweetpotato, sorghum, cassava, millet or teff in Africa, Latin America andparts of Asia.

I’d be surprised if the price of teff would treble as a result of the rising price of substitute products, though I suppose this is theoretically possible.

Yesterday, Barney Jopson, also in the FT, apparently reporting from here in Addis, offered a different explanation:

The crisis has been magnified by local factors – drought, hoarding, and a splurge of public infrastructure investment that has left the finances of the country’s cash-strapped government under strain.

Unfortunately, Jopson doesn’t offer us any evidence for any of this. Who are these people “hoarding” teff, and where is it? In which parts of the country has drought caused a reduction in teff production, and by how much has the supply of teff fallen, overall? I’m particularly at a loss to understand Jopson’s thought that investment in public infrastructure would lead to rising food prices (though I can see why it has made it more difficult for the Government of Ethiopia to use subsidies or tax cuts to offset the effects.)

I’d like to see some more thorough reporting of teff production. My hunch is that food production figures  have been flattered by official statistics in recent years, possibly to bolster GDP growth figures (agricultural production being a substantial share of GDP), and that the government has run down domestic teff reserves to make up the difference between actual and reported production. Now that the reserves are running low, the tightening of supply is leading to the increase in prices. But I have no more evidence for this than Jopson’s theory that it is because of hoarding.

The Los Angeles Times reckons it knows the causes of Ethiopia’s famines:

Simply put, the nation, in which 85% of people toil as small farmers, has reached a point where it can’t easily grow enough food to meet its needs. Although agricultural production has increased overall, it has declined per capita, according to the World Bank.

This is a complete pile of piffle. Overpopulation is not the problem:

• Population density is about 70 people per km2 in Ethiopia. That may seem a lot - it is about twice the density of the US. But Nigeria has a population density of 142 p/km2; China 138 p/km2; Sri Lanka 316 p/km2; Rwanda 343 p/km2; South Korea 498 p/km2. There is no famine in any of those countries. So why is 70 people per square km too many in Ethiopia?
• There was famine in Ethiopia in both the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was one third and one half, respectively, of the population today.
• Of Ethiopia’s 113 million hectares, less than 5% is currently irrigated. Ethiopia is the water tower of East Africa, with huge natural resources. But it is one of the lowest ranked countries in the world in the use of irrigation, fertilizers, modified seeds, tractors and other technologies that would multiply agricultural production.

The problem in Ethiopia’s agriculture is not shortage of land relative to the size of the population but shortage of resources, especially money and appropriate technology.

You have to wonder at lazy journalism like this. Is there a whiff of racism in the knee-jerk assumption that Ethiopia’s problem is that there are “too many of them”?