A Mercy Corps beneficiaries show off their garden in Niger. Photo: Jeremy Barnicle/Mercy Corps

Last week the UN announced that the number of people suffering from hunger now totals one billion worldwide.

Not too surprisingly, a BBC article points out that the vast majority of the world's hungry live in developing countries. Only 15 million are in the developed world. In contrast, 265 million live in sub-Saharan Africa and more than two times as many — 642 million to be exact — live in the Asia-Pacific region.

Since the economic crisis hit, there are about 100 million more people that are hungry. The UN attributes this rise in world hunger to unemployment and low wages. This is turn hurts people's ability to buy and grow food.

Jacques Diouf, the director general of the UNFAO, focused on agricultural investment as one of the solutions to help developing countries address hunger issues. Diouf is quoted by the BBC as saying, "Investment in agriculture must be increased because for the majority of poor countries a healthy agricultural sector is essential to overcome poverty and hunger and is a pre-requisite for overall economic growth."

At a time when need has never been greater, Mercy Corps has been able to expand our capacity to address hunger in the communities where we work.

By the summer of 2008, the price of rice had increased five times from the average price in 2005. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

The following post is from One Table, a Mercy Corps campaign to fight world hunger by investing in the world's women.

Today almost a billion people worldwide are unable to buy or grow enough food to avoid malnutrition. That's 120 million more than were hungry in 2006.

What happened? Basically, the world saw dramatic spikes in food prices. But there were many underlying causes of what's known as the global food crisis:

• Drought and other climate-related problems that resulted in smaller harvests
• Changing diets — rise of the middle class in India and China and an increased demand for food, especially meat, which requires large amounts of grain to raise
• Diversion of crops from food production to the production of biofuels
• High fuel prices during 2008 — if it costs more to transport food, prices go up
• Declining investments in agricultural productivity — total agriculture development aid to poor countries plunged from $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004. At the same time, the developing world's cities have been ballooning with people who do not grow any of their food
• Export bans and restrictions last year in several major grain-producing countries like China as governments sought to lower food prices for their own citizens, with the result of reducing the global supply on hand.

While food prices have come down from their highs of 2008, they remain substantially above historic levels. Many economists feel this trend, which most severely affects those who can least afford it, is likely to continue for some time.

The economic, health and societal costs of the global food crisis have been severe. One of the first things Mercy Corps did to figure out how and where to direct our efforts was to survey the communities where we work. We discovered that within communities Mercy Corps serves, roughly 70 percent of income is spent on food, and 80 percent of the population had been affected by rising food prices over the past year. The survey also confirmed something we already suspected: that families were coping with higher prices by eating fewer meals, selling off household belongings, going into debt and removing children from school so that they can work.

In addition to being a record year for food prices, it's also been a record year for our food security team, allowing Mercy Corps to aggressively respond to this crisis. We now have 17 programs in 13 countries designed specifically to respond to this on-going problem. Through support from donors including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gap Foundation, the Hunger Site, and private individuals, our Food Crisis Response employs a strategy designed to ensure that the groundwork for increased prosperity in the future is laid — even while addressing the immediate problem of accessing sufficient food.

Food distributions, much of which are specifically targeted to improve child nutrition, are taking place in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Niger, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and again Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps is helping hungry households to access food by providing employment opportunities, agricultural training and inputs (such as seeds and tools), and helping people establish and grow small businesses.

Combined, these programs are reaching almost 1.5 million individuals who have been directly impacted by higher food prices. Overall, Mercy Corps’ Crisis Response will lead to a sustainable increase in income for these people, leading in turn to greater food security over the long-term.

A rice farmer in Indonesia. Photo: David Snyder for Mercy Corps

While we all hoped that the worst of the food crisis was over, it looks like food prices are again on the rise — imperiling the health of maybe a billion people.

The credit freeze has left many of the world's farmers unable to secure loans for seeds, fertilizer and equipment. Some farmers are simply not planting crops or resorting to private creditors charging usurious rates of interest.

Even though food prices have declined since their peak in 2008, world grain prices are still 27 percent higher than in 2005, according to the director general of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and are likely to climb.

“It's possible the tally of undernourished people in the world will surpass one billion, from 963 million in 2007, as the full brunt of higher food prices filters through,” the director general, Jacques Diouf, told reporters at a biennial UN food-policy conference in Bangkok.

While some countries are setting aside funds for agricultural investment, many food-policy specialists worry that the money isn't enough to make up for the loss of private-sector credit.

This is why the UN World Food Program is calling on G-20 leaders to commit funding to fight hunger at their meeting in London this week.

The U.S. Navy comes to the assistance of a Taiwanese-flagged fishing trawler been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Photo: Open Democracy (flickr)

After 18 years of civil war, some good news is finally coming from Somalia. The recent election of Sharif Ahmed, a moderate Islamist, as Somalia’s new president brings the country a chance for peace and stability. But the country faces enormous problems and President Ahmed has a mammoth task on his hands — both domestically and internationally.

Perhaps the biggest challenges lay within Somalia’s own borders. Considered as a failed state since the early 1990s, Somalia has seen its worst spate of violence in decades over the past two years: Ethiopian troops invaded the country, at least 10,000 Somalis have been killed and more than one million displaced.

Much of this bloodshed and displacement comes from the poor security conditions and widespread lawlessness spawned by fighting between rival warlords, clans and other armed groups. This lack of national security poses a huge problem for Ahmed’s nascent presidency: Somalia’s two main insurgent groups, Hezbul Islam and Al-Shabaab, control “much of the south of the country” and refuse to recognize the election. Getting Somalia’s clans behind a centralized government is a task that previous Somali leaders have failed to meet.

In a country that has no almost running water or electricity, Ahmed also has numerous humanitarian challenges. The Red Cross considers Somalia's food crisis to be one of the worst in the world. And the country's infrastructure, already-limited agricultural systems and market linkages, has been severely damaged during the continuous internal conflict of past decades. As a result, more than a third of the population depends on food aid. Health care has also been decimated: Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital city of 3.6 million people has only two or three hospitals that barely operate at all.

Providing this critical food and health care will be very difficult, however, until some form of security is established. The government must find a way to ensure that youth have the education and economic opportunities they need so that they have less incentive to take a $15-a-day paycheck to join one of armed groups. But the already-precarious education gap is widening: at least 81 percent of Somalia's population is now illiterate — the highest such rate in Africa — and only 17 percent of Somali children go to school.

A moderate new government headed by an energetic and idealistic president has succeeded in giving Somalis hope — but delivering results is crucial to showing the country’s embattled population that their government is actually making a difference.

After suffering through last year's global food crisis, the return of grain prices to reasonable levels is widely welcomed. But the New York Times reports today that the swift drop in grain prices is reducing the odds of countries like Senegal achieving food independence anytime soon, and could, in fact, lead to financial ruin for the Senegalese farmers who planted more rice this year in hopes of selling it at the higher price.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has developed a new tool to measure the state of a country's food system and its ability to withstand global shocks. Rather than just predicting food crises through its current early warning system, the new tool will help to measure a region's resilience — defined, in humanitarian terms, as "the ability of a system to withstand stresses and shocks in an uncertain world."

Luca Alinovi, a senior economist at FAO, explains that the logarithm for measuring resilience was developed in the Palestinian Territory, which serves as an example of a vulnerable, but ultimately resilient society. "The Palestinians have been living under incredible stress for a long time; everyone is vulnerable there," explained Alinovi. "Despite that, they continue to live and work in that situation — they are a particularly resilient community."

Data is collected according to five pillars: existing social safety nets, access to public services, assets, income and food access, households' capacity to adapt, and the stability of food supply. The goal is that this data will complement the FAO's early warning system — which focuses mainly on immediate upcoming crises — and allow for more effective long-term aid and planning. For example, stronger public services in a country that is highly susceptible to annual drought might mean less personal hardship if and when such droughts occur.

While critics may dismiss the new tool as no more than semantic brouhaha, there are real signs that the notion of resilience suggests a genuine paradigm shift. Mafa Chipeta, a FAO Representative in Ethiopia, recently spoke much less theoretically about resilience by underscoring the need for improving access to water, protecting natural resources, and addressing land tenure. "We need to think beyond responding at the consumption end and start putting resources on the production end," says Chipeta. "Scarce resources are better spent on increasing production than on subsidizing food. If you subsidize grain, next year you have to subsidize it again."

In other words, we need to put aid money into developing successful food systems, rather than waiting to spend money on one-time aid when a crisis hits. After all, without investments into a resilient agricultural sector, an eventual crisis is inevitable. Seen in this context, the FAO's new tool is representative of recent major shifts in food policy — reflecting growing consensus that in the long run, food aid fails to address genuine need. For millions of vulnerable people who have seen the pattern of crisis hit time and time again, this may be one critical step toward breaking that cycle for good.

It's high time to focus cash and energy on alleviating global poverty. Photo: Stitch (flickr)

After a few fumbled attempts on their own, global financial leaders gathered in Washington D.C. last weekend to develop a joint plan to prevent the spread of the financial crisis.

Imagine if they focused just a fraction of that attention on alleviating global poverty. After all, high food and fuel prices pushed an additional 75 million people further into poverty this year.

"When food prices peaked and began to come down, despite the fact that conditions within poor countries remained hugely adverse, attention already started to wane," development economist Jeffry Sachs told Reuters. By contrast, the world's finance ministers jumped to commit incredibly large sums of money when credit markets started to fail — a crisis that continues to hold the world's attention.

"The amounts that are needed (to help the poor grow more food) are in the low billions of dollars and we're talking every day now about a new commitment of hundreds of billions for this and hundreds of billions for that," says Sachs. "The truth about poverty is that the poor don't need very much."

In other words, $700 billion — or whatever the astronomical total the worldwide bailout turns out to be — would go a long, long way.

First, food and fuel prices skyrocketed, causing serious problems for families in the developing world. Now, the worldwide credit crisis has delivered yet another serious blow to the economic outlook for low and middle-income countries.

At the start of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank annual meeting, World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that the triple threat is potentially a “tipping point” that would “push poor people to the brink of survival.” World finance and development ministers urged wealthier governments not to ignore aid commitments in the midst of their own economic woes. The World Bank has developed a list of 28 of the countries most vulnerable to the triple threat of increased food and fuel prices and the financial crisis.

Not suprisingly, 13 out the 28 countries on this list are in Africa. But sub-Saharan Africa may avoid the worst of the global financial meltdown. A recent article in the Economist points out that the region has a number of things working in its favor. These include a highly regulated banking sector that is relatively unlinked to the Western financial system and natural resources that are drawing investment from countries like China, India and the United States.

Back in January, two IMF staffers noted that investor confidence in Africa was on the rise. Still, it's hard to argue that Africa can continue to make as much progress without outside help, like the promised $350 million more in agricultural loans from the 185-country-owned World Bank. “The stark reality," Zoellick says, "is that developing countries must prepare for a drop in trade, capital flows, remittances, and domestic investment, as well as a slowdown in growth."

In Afghanistan, war and a severe winter followed by harsh drought are compounding problems of high food costs, leading to a situation in which a quarter of the Afghan population may face severe food shortages.

As winter approaches the food shortages are already affecting the country's internal security, and things are likely to get worse when snow falls next month, reports the New York Times.

Returning refugees are already converging on the cities because they cannot manage in the countryside, and they make easy recruits for the Taliban or other groups that want to create instability, said Ashmat Ghani, an opposition politician and tribal leader from Logar Province, south of Kabul, the nation’s capital.

A photo slide show from the New York Times' depicts the crisis through haunting images of Afghanistan's landscape and citizens.

A new UN Food and Agriculture Organization report predicts that rising food prices will soon begin to slow. However the BBC decidedly reports that cheap food is a thing of the past:

[Food] prices will level off at a far higher average level than seen before the crisis erupted. The long era of cheap food is over.

The sharp rise in food prices over the past year have been felt all over the world but are particularly painful for the poor in developing countries. The World Bank recently estimated that higher food prices and food scarcity could force 100 million people to become impoverished. In response, The World Bank is allocating $1.2 billion for increased food aid. At least $200 million is designated for grants targeting "high risk" countries including Liberia, Haiti and Djibouti.

Photo: Henry McInnis for Mercy Corps

Along the banks of the Nile River in Sudan is some of the most fertile land in Africa. In fact, “Sudan could be self-sufficient, it does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa,” notes Kenro Oshidari, director of the UN World Food Program in Sudan.

Despite a harsh humanitarian situation in Darfur, and being the recipient of the most food aid, Sudan is actually a major exporter of sorghum, wheat, beans, peanuts, and tomatoes, among other crops. Just last year the U.S. shipped 283,000 tons of sorghum to Darfur — almost the exact same amount of sorghum exported by Sudan, UN officials told the New York Times.

Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times explores the complexity of food aid in Sudan in his revealing article; "The Food Chain: Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells Food."

Photo: Mark Sun (flickr)

When stomachs go hungry, the women of Lima, Peru, find themselves cooking for half a million of its residents in one of the thousands of community kitchens spread across the city.

Known as comedores populares, community kitchens started in the 1970s have been part of a collective social movement led by poor women across Lima to combat food insecurity in a country where 40 percent of its population of 28 million people live below the poverty line. Its members pool together their limited resources and take turns cooking for themselves and the community at large, preparing some 100 meals a day.

An article by Upside Down World, an online magazine covering activism and politics in Latin America, provided insight as to how these self-sustaining organizations work:

Sixty percent go to members and their families; 12 percent to the members who cook as payment for their labor (there is no other pay); and 8 percent is donated to poor people in the neighborhood (called "social cases"). Only 18 percent of the meals are sold, half to people in the community, usually the same individuals, and the other half to people who happen to be in the area, such as service people and others.

With food inflation rising twice as fast as other goods in Peru, these community kitchens continue to be a lifeline to those who would otherwise go hungry. Not surprisingly, the women "now cook 10 times as much as they used to before prices spiked," according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor. With only 19 percent of their food subsidized by the government, community kitchens rely primarily on their members and donations for support.

But the rewards of being part of a community kitchen go beyond alleviating hunger by giving these women a sense of solidarity, collectivity, and respect. Participating in a community kitchen means that they become members of the Federation of Women Organized in Committees of Self-Sustaining Kitchens, an organization that oversees 1,300 kitchens in Lima.

Most importantly, the organization offers lifelong skills by providing “leadership training courses for the women, information about health care, training in establishing micro-enterprises to generate additional family income, help and advice in obtaining credit.”

The women are also actively engaged in Peru’s public policy, particularly the country’s food production and distribution system. According to The Christian Science Monitor, community kitchens “have risen as one of the most significant women's organizations in Latin America, and today are on the forefront of protests demanding solutions to a cost of living that many say is reversing recent progress in reducing poverty.”

Filling in where the government falls short, and acting as a source of hope for the poorest of the poor, it appears that community kitchens in Peru are also inspiring other parts of the world to follow suit. Community kitchens can be found in places like India and the United States, where restaurants, such as One World Cafe in Utah, depend on the kindness of the rich and poor to survive.

For the people of Haiti, a country that depends heavily on food imports, the combination of rapidly rising oil and food prices is making life extremely difficult. So difficult that, according to The Guardian, Haiti’s poor are forced to depend on buying hardened patties of clay and water to fill their stomachs. What’s worse, even these are not inflation-proof. In the Guardian article, a mud cake baker says she is struggling to keep costs down, since clay-rich mud needs to be trucked in from outside Port-Au-Prince.

The dire food situation spawned riots in Haiti in early April 2008, and there seems to be few signs of improvement. The government of Haiti is attempting to revive the agricultural sector in the country, a task that will be hindered by “scant resources, degraded soil and land ownership dispute,” according to The Guardian.

The challenges are steep, but a Haitian dairy cooperative called Let Agogo (Creole for “milk in abundance”) is serving as a model of agricultural possibility in this poverty-stricken nation.

In Haiti, milk is the second most imported food item, with 40 million Euro worth imported into the country each year. Rising import prices have made the cost of a gallon of milk as high as $9 – a prohibitive amount for the majority of Haiti's population, 54 percent of whom make less than $1 a day.

Let Agogo’s parent NGO, Veterimed, created a network of 13 micro-dairies and works with the dairy farmers to improve sustainability and productivity. Milk products from these dairies are then sold all over Haiti. This project not only provides Haitians with an affordable nutrient source, but it creates sorely-needed jobs as well.

At present, nearly 75 percent of food in Haiti is imported. While agricultural self-sufficiency might not be possible (or even reasonable), it could be beneficial for Haiti to combat the effects of unstable global food and oil prices by lessening their dependence on staple imports and creating a strong agricultural infrastructure. Let Agogo is one step towards that goal.

With the recent economic turmoil and the declining value of the dollar, some people are turning to gold for economic security in their time of need. In recent months, the price of gold has jumped to a high of nearly $1,000 per ounce.

In light of this, the World Bank’s private branch, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has helped finance AngloGold Ashanti and Newmont Mining to open gold mines in the rich reserves of Ghana. These organizations claim that by developing the region's resources, they will be able to stimulate economic growth and pull the country's people out of poverty.

However, several NGOs in the region and the above Al Jazeera report claim that is the exact opposite of what this initiative has accomplished. Ghanaians in the west have been experiencing harder times as a direct result of the gold mines. Only the multinational companies that own the mines seem to be reaping the economic benefits. According to Al Jazeera, only 3 percent of the gold profits go back into Ghana.

To build the mines, these companies have also taken over many of the villagers’ farmland where they live and work. Many of the land owners of the region claim that the companies did not compensate them enough for their precious land. The people who worked on the farms were also only paid for a single harvest. Without these farms, many of these farmers have nowhere to live and no way to survive.

Furthermore, Oxfam and FIAN claim that the companies are not respecting the rights and safety of the nearby villagers. Community water sources have been polluted from improper drainage from the worker housing compounds and from the disposal of dangerous chemicals used in mining.

The development of the gold mines could lead to greater problems for Ghana on a national scale. The fertile lands of western Ghana allow even a small farm to be self-sustainable for several generations, which has helped to keep Ghana’s food stores stable. However, by favoring the gold mines over farms, Ghana may eventually begin to suffer the effects of the food crisis that is already plaguing many of its neighbors.

Despite record prices, the real beneficiaries of Ghana's gold remain questionable. Is it the people of Ghana, as the IFC and the mining companies insist, or is it the mining companies themselves?

Can a small group of people lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs and the U.N. Millennium Village project are aiming to do just that. Through a community-led approach, the Millennium Villages Project addresses extreme poverty in rural Africa through projects designed around achieving the Millennium Development Goals — eight agreed-upon targets to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2015.

In total, there are 79 Millennium Villages spread across the continent, that are grouped in 12 clusters. The villages are located in different agro-ecological zones that are representative of the farming, water and disease challenges facing the continent. Sachs believes this is why the Millennium Village Project is a scalable model that can be adapted across the different regions of Africa.

Sachs' theory suggests that starting with a big commitment to just these few villages and their small-scale farming might be the key to poverty alleviation. Each Millennium Village Project team works through poverty issues in each village by providing access to advanced technology that can better health, education, and farming productivity. For example, agricultural techniques have been improved by the introduction of fertilizers and crop diversification.

There are still many skeptics of the Millennium Villages' approach to ending poverty. Relaxing taxes on imports like fertilizer could do more argues development consultant Sam Rich in The Wilson Quarterly. These villages may have seen some positive impact early on but many persistent issues remain: dependence on subsistence crops is still depleting the soil and major infrastructure issues, like bad roads and a lack of electricity, have still not been addressed.

Last week I had the chance to visit a Millennium Village called Tiby, located in Mali, West Africa. I had expected to witness a tightly run program, with strong, scalable results. Instead I was shocked to see how disorganized the program was and how little had been accomplished by its third year. The community-based committees in Tiby were in place but had yet to receive any training in planning or management.

Each Millennium Village costs $110 per person every year over a period of five years. The majority of the funds come from donor funding through the Millennium Villages program but also include funding from local governments, partner organizations, and the villagers themselves.

It's easy to criticize the Millennium Village approach for spending a lot of money on a relatively small a group of people but let's this into perspective. In the first six months of 2008, the U.S. government contributed $830,353,769 to the World Food Program. That same amount would be able to support 1.5 million people through the Millennium Villages Project. In the long-run, the per-person investment through the Millennium Villages Project actually saves money — if the project proves successful, and the beneficiaries become self-sufficient and no longer depend on distributions from humanitarian aid groups.

So, can a small group of people really lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

My own impression of the project, albeit from the vantage point of a single village, is that it is a band-aid for the symptoms of poverty, rather than a program that effectively addresses the root causes. The initiative's statistics may suggest otherwise, but the reality is that there is no quick fix to alleviating extreme poverty.