The average consumer in a developing country wastes 24 pounds of food. In comparison, the average western consumer wastes about 220 pounds. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

As food prices soar, one culprit might be our relationship with the landfill.

About one billion tons of food is wasted yearly, according to the UNFAO. The average consumer in a developing country wastes 24 pounds of food. In comparison, the average western consumer wastes about 220 pounds.

Last year, food prices reached the highest levels globally since the UN’s FAO indexing began in 1990. This year, food prices could rise another 20 percent. And when food prices rise, food insecurity follows, impacting rich and poor countries alike.

The recent increase in food prices can be explained by several factors: growing energy demands, population pressures, and a series of particularly severe weather events, according to the New York Times. In 2010, crops perished from wildfires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, cyclones in Australia, and severe droughts in Latin America. But despite these natural explanations, one of the largest burdens to addressing food insecurity is waste, — 30-50 percent of food produced is wasted globally.

But reasons for wasting food differ greatly across the world. Rich countries waste due to habit. Poor countries waste due to inadequate storage, according to a special report by The Economist.

Without proper equipment to store food, farming regions in poor countries waste the most -- involuntarily. Silos, transportation vehicles, and refrigerators are all essential for storing crops, along with preventing dairy and vegetables from spoiling. But these materials are expensive. Kanayo Nwanze, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, tells the Economist that in poor countries, losses from wasted food could be cut in half. But this requires large investment in agricultural infrastructure.

In contrast, waste from wealthier countries can be explained by habit. In the U.S., food insecurity is not an apparent problem with food being so affordable and available. Average Americans spend 10 percent of their income on food. In poor countries, it's closer to 70 percent. Poor countries conserve because they have to; rich countries waste because they can.

The solution: poor countries need heavy investment and rich countries need behavioral change. Laurie Garrett, CFR’s Senior Fellow for Global Health, says food production in the developing world needs dramatic improvement and greater efficiency in “every aspect of farming, harvesting, delivery, and distribution." As for rich countries, a greater appreciation of the food crisis might be necessary.

We don't have to waste. Unless poor countries receive greater investment and rich countries avoid being liberal with the landfill, food prices are unlikely to drop.

More than 70 percent of the population in the Congo is impoverished, making the country extremely vulnerable to price shocks. Photo: Jenny Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Wildfires in Russia. Revolution in the Middle East. Rising oil prices — these seemingly unconnected events have cumulated in a weak global harvest that will place additional burden on families whose budgets are already stretched thin.

According to a United Nations press conference earlier this month, food prices hit record levels earlier this year. Citing data gathered from the World Bank, the UN reported that rice posted gains of 21 percent, whereas corn and wheat jumped 64 and 68 percent from last year. While this increase has yet to be reflected in markets and grocery stores, a rise is surely on its way.

In the press conference, the UN noted that the world’s poorest people, living on less than $2 a day, are now spending an average of 15 percent more to cover basic nutritional needs. What is more, the World Bank estimates that the spike in food costs has pushed a further 44 million people into extreme poverty.

To help get a better sense of how rising food prices are impacting people in different parts of the world, check out this great graphic developed by a UC Berkley graduate student. The graphic draws on data collected by the Economic Research Service of the USDA.

However, it's important to remember that much is lost in these statistics. Household grown food, or food resulting from bartering is not measured. The data also misses the effect of food or crop subsidies.

There are other critical questions as well, such as who in each country will bear the burden of increasing prices. Traditionally such hardships are placed on those least able to respond and as food prices continue to rise, the poverty rate is likely to follow.

Many African countries, like Madagascar pictured here, are increasingly leasing land to foreign firms, but critics argue the deals are exploitative. Photo: goukley (flickr)

A million hectares in Uganda. Some 690,000 hectares in Sudan. And 500,000 hectares in Tanzania. These are just a few of the numbers that have appeared on the bargaining table in the past year as foreign firms scramble for land leases in Africa.

The Independent takes a look at the phenomenon known as "land grabbing," or the recent trend of foreign governments and corporations leasing or purchasing large swaths of land in poorer countries to grow food or other crops for export back to their home country. The phenomenon is most prevalent in Africa, but leases have been sought elsewhere, including the Philippines and Pakistan.

[The sudden increase in "land grabbing"] has its roots in the food crisis of 2007/8, when prices of rice, wheat and other cereals skyrocketed across the world, triggering riots from Haiti to Senegal. The price spike also led food-growing countries to slap export tariffs on staple crops to minimize the amounts that left their countries. That tightened the supply still further, meaning food prices were driven up more by a situation of policy-created scarcity than by supply and demand.

This situation also made many rich countries that are reliant on massive food imports question one of the fundamentals of the global economy: the idea that every country should concentrate on its best products and then trade. Suddenly having unimaginable quantities of cash from oil was not enough to guarantee you all the food you needed. The oil sheikhs of the Gulf states found that food imports had doubled in cost over less than five years. In the future it might get even worse. You could no longer rely on regional and global markets, they concluded. The rush to grab land began.

Investors say they will bring needed infrastructure, technology and employment, but in some cases, these investments have been met with resistance. Riots erupted earlier this year in Madagascar, where almost half the children under age five don't get enough to eat. The riots were driven in part by the news that the government had given South Korean firm Daewoo a 99 year lease over 1.3 million hectares of land. On an area amounting to half the island's arable land, Daewoo planned to grow maize and palm oil solely for export to South Korea. The deal fell through when the riots forced the president, Marc Ravalomanana, out of office, BBC News reports.

Nevertheless, land grabbing is poised to continue at a rapid pace, according to The Independent:

The government of President Ravalomanana became the first in the world to be toppled because of what the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization recently described as "land grabbing." The Daewoo deal is only one of more than 100 land deals which have, over the past 12 months, seen massive tracts of cultivable farmland across the globe bought up by wealthy countries and international corporations. The phenomenon is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in just the past six months.

Critics question the truthfulness of the investors' promises. The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, warned that land grabbing is simply neo-colonialism, and Africa will again be exploited for its resources while seeing little direct revenue.

The Independent offers an analogy from international development policy consultant Mark Weston for understanding the current nature of the leases and what makes them magnets for controversy:

Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a British government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of the economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for the next 99 years back to China.

Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people.

Land grabbing is just one aspect of the current discussion about agricultural development in Africa. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Kenya earlier this month she voiced interest in Africa's agricultural potential: "More and more, the world will look to Africa to be its breadbasket, and I hope that when the world looks ... it is Africans and African farmers who will profit from becoming the world's breadbasket."

The U.S. farming industry has taken quite a hit recently.

Just a year ago, prices were reaching record-breaking highs. But the food-price boom has been followed by a bust, and for many farmers it's costing them more to run their farms than they are actually making by selling their crops, reports CNN.

Jimmy Wayne Kinder, a fourth-generation farmer in Oklahoma, lamented about crop prices to the New York Times. “The market says, ‘Here’s the price. You want to make any money, get below it.'" Jimmy's story is part of a New York Times series called "The Food Chain," which allows you to examine the shifting changes in global demand and actual food production through articles, video and slideshows.

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."