Category: Food security, nutrition & sustainable agriculture

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Once again the media is presenting us with the images of the mother of all famines – stretching from the Yemen to Somalia, to Sudan and South Sudan, to the Central African Republic, to northern Nigeria.

It’s a bad famine but there have been bad famines in the not so distant past – the great Ethiopian one in 1985, which triggered the rock star, Bob Geldorf, to organise a massive world-wide popular response. (I remember running with tens of thousands of other campaigners in London’s Hyde Park.) Before that, in 1974 at the World Food Conference, there was a real feeling that the world was running out of food and dramatic new policies must be put in place by the richer countries.

By Fabíola Ortiz

MARRAKECH (IDN) – The African continent is responsible for emitting only four percent of greenhouse gas emissions, yet six of the ten countries most threatened by the climate change effects of such emissions are in Africa.

With the continent currently receiving just five percent of funds to combat or cope with climate change, and a very small proportion of these being allocated in the agricultural sector, experts at the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP22) in Marrakech have warned that agricultural yields in Africa could fall 20 percent by 2050 if agriculture does not adapt to climate change.

There is a strong need to increase the continent’s resilience to the impacts of climate change, Mohammed Badraoui, head of Morocco’s National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), told IDN.

By Bernhard Schell

MARRAKECH (IDN) – The South Centre and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN have decided to join together to foster South-South Cooperation with the aim to improve food security, boost rural development, and address climate change in the Global South.

The five-year cooperation agreement – in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) – builds on years of collaboration between the two organizations. It was signed on November 11 on the sidelines of the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22) taking place in Marrakech; Morocco from November 7 to 18, 2016.

By Jutta Wolf

BERLIN (IDN) – Global warming threatens to cause a huge economic damage to agriculture, adding up to the annual amount of roughly 0.8 percent of global GDP by the end of the century, which translates to losses of $2.5 trillion dollars, warns a new study.

But further trade liberalization in agricultural commodities could reduce financial damage globally by 65 percent, to 0.3 percent of global GDP (Gross Domestic Product), says Miodrag Stevanovićby, lead author of the study by a team of scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Viewpoint by GRAIN

BARCELONA (IDN-INPS) – Ever since the ink dried on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), people have become aware of another mega-trade deal being negotiated behind closed doors in the Asia-Pacific region. Like the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) threatens to increase corporate power in member countries, leaving ordinary people with little recourse to assert their rights to things like land, safe food, life-saving medicines and seeds.

RCEP is being negotiated between the ten countries that form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and their six biggest trading partners in the region: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

According to the latest leaked draft of the RCEP agreement, dated October 15, 2015 and published by Knowledge Ecology International, the negotiating countries fall into two camps when it comes to legal rights over biodiversity and traditional knowledge useful for food production and medicine.