Global IssuesResearch Grant Aims to Meet Critical Maize Shortfalls
As the world's largest international agricultural research coalition celebrated its 40th anniversary here this week, it also announced the launch of a programme to help provide enough maize to meet the annual food demands of over 600 million consumers by 2030.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said the new initiative will inject 170 million dollars into research for developing drought- resistant maize varieties and improving and disseminating already-developed strains that possess resistance to major diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
'This is a highly ambitious project to address world hunger,' said Thomas Lumpkin, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). 'It will take an enormous amount of work and cooperation between public and private sector institutions to meet the goals,' he added.
The world's agricultural system is indeed facing difficult challenges. As the global population continues to increase - hitting an expected seven billion this year, according to the U.N. - adequate distribution of the world's food supply has lagged, and prices are volatile. Meanwhile, vital research and development programmes have been slashed, especially in poor countries where hunger pains are the sharpest and most pervasive.
In June 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged 3.5 billion dollars as part of a 22-billion-dollar commitment by the Group of Eight (G8) to a new global hunger and food security initiative for some 22 billion dollars announced at their summit in L'Aquila, Italy.
But the tug of war between Congress and the administration regarding the depleted U.S. Treasury has so far made it impossible for Obama to honour his pledge, and his administration's proposals to boost aid for agricultural research and developments have experienced the most drastic cuts.
As the world recovers from a global financial crisis, only a quarter of the commitments made at L'Aquila have been met today, Dr. Shenngen Fan, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, told IPS.
'Before the international community issues any new recommendations, they first need to make good on previous commitments,' he said. Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution - the first organised large-scale venture to develop new strains for staple crops grown in the Global South - investments in agricultural research and development are barely beginning to recover from lows reached in the early 2000s.
Before the Green Revolution caught on in the late 1960s, one in every three people living in the developing world was undernourished. As the peak years of the Green Revolution drew to a close in the 1990s, that ratio had fallen to one in five. The total number of undernourished also dropped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.
Nevertheless, the initial outpouring of financial support for the Green Revolution - which helped the food supply outpace the growth in the world's population between 1970 and 1990 - progressively weakened in the years that followed, as wealthy countries shifted their priorities and aid away from agriculture.
The imbalance between supply and demand over much of the past decade has resulted in huge price jumps that, though tolerable in the West, have created a 'toxic brew of real pain contributing to social unrest' around the world, noted Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, last month. The World Bank is one of the founders of the CGIAR and acts as trustee of the CGIAR Fund.
Anti-riot police turned to tear gas and dogs Thursday to disperse crowds of angry Kenyans protesting the increasingly unaffordable prices for maize flour - a staple source of food for the country's 40 million people. They are among the estimated 12 million people in the Horn of Africa to have been hit by this year's drought, which is the worst in 60 years.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service