Addis Fortune: Ethiopia: Not Too Many to Feed
November 14, 2011
Around the world, the growth of 200 million children is stunted. That is one-third of all children in the world under the age of five years old. In some African countries, the proportion of children stunted is as high as half the total number. There are shocking statistics.
These deaths are intolerable because they are preventable. Global policy makers have known how to prevent them for a long time; the answer lies in a combination of breastfeeding and better diets, including adequate minerals and vitamins, along with various medical interventions.
These are immediate problems that humans urgently need to tackle. But the agony extends to the need to cater for a planet that, by 2050, will have an extra two or more billion mouths to feed.
Added to these increasing demands are difficulties with supply. Rising oil prices mean greater transport costs and higher prices for fertilizers and pesticides. The world does not have significantly more land to cultivate and it will have to do more with what it has by producing higher yields on the same land area. Water is also getting scarcer. By 2025, three billion people will live in water stressed countries, having less than 1,700 cubic meters of water annually for a person, the threshold for meeting the water requirements for agriculture, industry, domestic purposes, energy and the environment. Land and water are becoming increasingly polluted and otherwise degraded.
On top of all of this, global warming remains worrisome. This is already leading to shorter growing seasons in the developing countries and reduced yields caused by high temperatures and lack of rainfall. Climate change also means more extremes of weather, more frequent and more intense tropical cyclones and droughts.
We will have to have the capacity to respond rapidly when weather disasters strike. Altogether, this requires a doubling of food production within the next four decades.
How could the world do it?
It needs all the technologies that it can lay its hands on; traditional technologies such as cultivating local varieties, intermediate technologies including treadle pumps to irrigate land, conventional technologies, modern platform technologies like nanotechnology, biotechnology and information and communication technology, which Africans are already using in innovative ways.
But there is no magic bullet. Technology, even if productive and environmentally friendly, will not be enough on its own. Farmers need access to seeds and fertilizers. The thousands of agro dealers and small village stores, which are springing up in Africa, are part of the answer. They, in turn, will have to rely on the innovative small seed and fertilizer companies that are being created. Microcredit is also a challenge. African banks have the funds but they need help in finding ways of providing inexpensive loans to farmers, backed up with forms of micro-insurance.
At the other end of the chain, farmers need to access markets for their grain and other products. Village cooperatives, contract farming and use of mobile phones to enable farmers get the best prices can all help.
Farmers are part of the private sector. They are often entrepreneurial and innovative. But their farms are usually very small. Over 80pc of African farmers are smallholders with less than two hectares of land holdings. They can only be innovative if they have access to inputs, either subsidized or at a cheap cost, and if they get a fair price for their products in the local or regional markets.
In the end, it comes down to good governance and committed political leadership. It is all optimistic, partly because there are good African examples of success. Notably, Ghana has already achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) of halving poverty and hunger. Former Ghanaian President John Kufuor received the World Food Prize earlier this month for his leadership in the country's journey to food security.
Maybe the seventh billion person was born lucky - in Africa?