“We have to make agriculture interesting for them, because they will not be motivated if they have to use jembes, and if the sector is not highly productive,” said Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose Forum address was delivered by the Minister for Labour Dalmas Otieno,

As a catalyst, Kenya government was urged to learn from the ongoing challenges with drought, crop disease and spiking food prices to ensure the right policy changes that will bring about the desired changes.

“The Kenya Government is deeply committed to investing in this sector, because we can see the potential it carries for attaining our food security objectives as well as increasing rural incomes. This commitment is evident in that we have positioned agriculture as one of the six sectors expected to generate the bulk of Vision 2030,” he added.

Kenya is currently implementing the Agriculture Sector Development Strategy (ASDS) which envisages a food secure and prosperous nation by 2020. Two pillars of that strategy are to reduce the number of food insecure people by 30 percent, and to reduce the numbers of people living below the poverty line to less than 25 percent.

Speaking at the Forum on behalf of Kenya’s Vision 2030, Mugo Kibati said, “Agriculture is the engine of our nation’s economy; yet far too many Kenyans struggle to ensure their fields prosper and their families are fed. There is far too much promise in our country’s agricultural sector for us to fall short of our economic potential. ”

The meeting was designed to strengthen the strategy framework for enhanced research innovation and small-holder farmer supports that will help Africa achieve its rightful place as a global leader in achieving sustainable food security.

AGRA President Jane Karuku called for deepening of alliances and investments in innovation that will help women and men on front lines of Kenya’s agricultural workforce. Given the proper support, the smallholder farmers can feed the future of the country and the continent.”

The Forum follows global meetings focused on food security and nutrition – WEF Africa, the G8 Summit and UK Hunger Summit – laying important groundwork for the upcoming African Green Revolution Forum which will sets the stage for African ownership in the next phase of scaling agricultural development solutions and steering investment to build a sustainable food secure future. The Forum also lends momentum in the lead up to the National Agriculture Sector Development Forum and the Vision 2030 Medium-Term Plan.

The Forum discussed the need for agricultural innovation, food pricing agricultural financing and links to nutrition. These issues are critically important given that agriculture accounts for 65 percent of Kenya’s total exports and provides more than 70 percent of informal employment in rural areas according to Kenya’s Agricultural Sector Development Strategy.

AUTHOR: Henry Neondo
URL: http:// www.africasciencenews.org
E-MAIL: neondohenry [at] yahoo.com

Ra'if Badawi is accused of attacking Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh (pictured above) among others, (Photo: Reuters)

King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud

Re: Saudi Arabia: Free Editor Ra’if Badawi Held Under Cybercrime Law

Dear Prime Minister,

I am William Nicholas Gomes, Human Rights Ambassador for Salem-News.com.

I have been informed by Human Rights Watch and credible sources within Saudi Arabia that prosecutors have charged Ra’if Badawi under the 2007 Anti-Cybercrime law, alleging that his website “infringes on religious values” by providing a platform for open debate of views on religion and religious figures.

According to media reports Court documents show the evidence against Badawi includes a post on the website that asks, “is God unjust?”, sarcastic remarks about the Saudi religious police and a senior scholar, and a post that asks, “why is Saudi’s Grand Mufti blind?”

The prosecution’s evidence includes five website postings by Badawi and anonymous website members critical of Saudi religious authorities and two postings regarding theological questions, the charge sheet says. If convicted, Badawi faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to three million Saudi Riyals (US$800,000).

According to information of human rights watch, Saudi security forces stopped Badawi and arrested him on June 17, 2012, as he was driving in Jeddah, his wife and a close associate told Human Rights Watch. On the website, Badawi and others had declared May 7 a day for Saudi liberals, hoping to garner interest in open discussion about the differences between popular religion and politicized religion, said Su’ad al-Shammari, secretary general of the website.

Badawi had been living away from his home for months to avoid a run-in with the police, although he did not believe he was formally wanted for arrest, Badawi told Human Rights Watch in March.

On March 18, Shaikh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a well-known conservative cleric, issued a religious ruling declaring Badawi an “unbeliever … and apostate who must be tried and sentenced according to what his words require.” Al-Barrak listed five pieces of what he described as evidence, such as Badawi’s alleged “claim that Muslims, Jews, Christians, and atheists are all equal,” and Badawi’s alleged “exposure of the inconveniences of the month of Ramadan.” Al-Barrak also dismissed the possibility of an open discussion of such matters, saying that even if these were not Badawi’s own opinions but an “account of the words of others, this is not allowed unless accompanied by a repudiation” of such words.

Saudi authorities have long harassed Badawi with politically motivated prosecutions for his debate of religious views, Human Rights Watch said. In March 2008, prosecutors arrested and detained Badawi for questioning, also for setting up his website, but released him after one day. Badawi left the country after being formally charged in May 2008. He returned when prosecutors apparently decided not to pursue his case, he told Human Rights Watch. Nevertheless, as a result of the charges, the government in 2009 barred Badawi from foreign travel and froze his business interests, depriving him of a source of income, he told Human Rights Watch.

Badawi had told Human Rights Watch that since al-Barrak’s March religious ruling, he feared for his life and for the lives of his family. His father and a brother have publicly distanced themselves from him and declared him an unbeliever. The charge sheet names his father as having initiated the legal action against Badawi, also including a charge of “filial disobedience,” although no instances of such disobedience are included in the charge sheet. A person close to Badawi told Human Rights Watch that Badawi has not seen his father in years.

Members of Badawi’s wife’s family also began agitating against him, Badawi told Human Rights Watch, leading his wife and three children to leave the country. Badawi had learned that his wife’s relatives were filing suit in a Jeddah court to have him forcibly divorced from his wife as an apostate, and thus not allowed to marry a Muslim woman under Islamic law. His wife and children remain abroad.

International human rights law protects the right to freedom of expression. International standards only allow content-based restrictions in extremely narrow circumstances, such as cases of slander or libel against private individuals or speech that threatens national security. Restrictions must be clearly defined, specific, necessary, and proportionate to the threat to the interest protected.

The mere fact that forms of expression are considered to be insulting to a public figure is not sufficient to justify the imposition of penalties, the UN Human Rights Committee said in its 2011 General Comment No. 34 regarding permissible limits on freedom of expression. Regarding restrictions for the protection of public morals, the committee in its 1993 General Comment No. 22 on freedom of religion observed “that the concept of morals derives from many social, philosophical and religious traditions; consequently, limitations… for the purpose of protecting morals must be based on principles not deriving exclusively from a single tradition.”

I urge you to immediately release editor Ra’if Badawi held under Cybercrime Law and ensure freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia.

AUTHOR: William Nicholas Gomes
URL: www.williamgomes.org
E-MAIL: williamgomes.org [at] gmail.com

What a irony of a nation, that brand itself as “shining” and whose Supreme Court have given directive that no one should die for want of food or of hunger in this country.

Two malnourished sisters, who did not step out of their house for the past six years, were rescued by a NGO from their home in Rohini sector 8, in the national capital region and got them admitted to a government hospital in Delhi.

They were found immensely dehydrated, in tattered clothes, with disheveled hair and had not taken bath since long when the NGO opened their house. They had wounds all over their body and they were bed-sores on their back and feet.

According to sources, Mamta Gupta (30), who is divorcee and has a teenaged son and her sister Neerja (28) stayed with their 65-year-old mother. The sisters were suffering from some psychological disorder.

The condition of the sisters also had to do with the family’s financial situation which had deteriorated soon after their father passed away a decade ago. Some relatives used to help them financially as they did not have any source of income but that was not enough.

It was on a distress call from the NGO that brought a Centralized Accident & Trauma Service (CATS) ambulance to their residence. The sisters were so frail that the para-medical staffs were scared of lift them by hand for fear that their bones could snap or the skin could peel off. It was impossible to measure their blood pressure.

While Neerja was still in her senses, Mamata was unconscious and had almost been reduced to a skeleton. She weighed just 20 kilos. Doctors attending Mamata said she was severely starved and her body is covered with bed sores and fungal infection. The functioning of her organs like heart, kidney and liver has also been affected due to prolonged starvation. She can’t move her body and her joints were stiff because she had been bedridden for several months and a chance of her survival was less.

The case of the two malnourished sisters is strikingly similar to the case reported in April 2011, when two sisters in their forties were rescued from Noida near New Delhi where they had locked themselves in for months after their father’s death and were found starving. While the Rohni sisters lived with their mother and teenage boy, the Noida sisters were living alone.

These cases open up the debate on social security net for the citizens of the country. There is something like old age pension, which is again being grossly misused, there is nothing to help the common citizens of the country.

Late president R. Venkataraman had taken up this issue after his retirement but his lone voice could not sustain the campaign of providing social security to citizens of the country. As a result even in the 21st century, the tag of ‘Hungry India; lingers on.

Malnutrition accounts for nearly 50% of child deaths in India. According to the latest report on the state of food insecurity in rural India, more than 1.5 million children are at risk of becoming malnourished because of rising global food prices.

The United Nations World Food Programme report points more than 27% of the world’s undernourished population lives in India while 43% of children (under 5 years) in the country are underweight. The figure is among the highest in the world.

The proportion of stunted children (under-5) at 48% is again among the highest in the world. Every second child in the country is stunted, according to the health ministry’s figures.

Imagine this with the report that ‘10,688 lakh tones of food grains were found damaged in FCI depots, enough to feed over six lakh people for over 10 years.’ Food worth nearly Rs 60,000 crore is being destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. The government spends about Rs 2.6 crore of the tax payers’ money to get rid of food grain that has rotted during storage.

The failure does not lie in any operational inability to produce more food, but a far reaching failure to make the poor of the country able to afford enough food.

Hunger is primarily a problem of general poverty, and thus overall economic growth and its distributional pattern cannot but be important in solving the hunger problem. It is important to pay attention to employment opportunities and other ways of acquiring economic means. It is also important to control food prices as it influences people’s lives.

It is shameful that in a country where so many people go hungry it is left to the media and other agencies to highlight the pathetic state of affairs. Right to food should be made the fundament right in the country.

AUTHOR: Mujtaba Syed
URL: http://mujtabas-musings.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: syedalimujtaba [at] yahoo.com

In a year of record high global food prices, child malnutrition has only increased and could hurt the progress made in recent years towards reducing the number of nutrition-related child deaths.   According to Save the Children chief executive Justin Forsyth, ”the world has made dramatic progress in reducing child deaths, down from 12 to 7.6 million, but this momentum will stall if we fail to tackle malnutrition” (BBC).  A 2008 series of reports by The Lancet: Maternal and Child Undernutrition, showed that over 1/3rd of childhood deaths, and 11% of diseases worldwide, are directly caused by maternal and child malnutrition.   Therefore it is clear that the global community and individual states must act to see that the needs of 500 million children are met, and end this crisis before the lives of more children are lost and the stability of future communities further declines.

In order to end undernourishment in children, we must also focus heavily on prenatal and postnatal care and nutrition for mothers, as this is the starting point for a lifetime of undernourishment and disease or a lifetime of health and prosperity. Often mothers are unaware of how their nutrition and health can affect the life of their unborn child thus prenatal education and nutrition programs are a major key to continued progress.   However, nutritional education cannot end there. Often families are uneducated on the effects of nutrition as a whole and issues such as exclusive breast feeding for the first six months and feeding their children from the basic food. Children are not always undernourished due to extreme poverty; how often or much they are fed also plays a significant factor.  In a recent report on Madagascar, the country’s high rates of stunting were shown to have been heavily impacted by harmful feeding practices.  The  2008-09 Madagascar Demographic Health Survey found that half of all Malagasy children under five are stunted, the sixth highest rate of stunting in the world, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).   “We found that the highest occurrence of stunting is not among the very poor, as they eat the vegetables that they grow instead of selling them, and these are rich in nutrients. The worst cases are those who can afford white rice,” said UNICEF nutrition expert Amal Bennaim (IRIN).   However, rice-based diets were often accompanied by other harmful feeding practices such as supplementing breast milk with tea or coffee and a failure to feed children enough, or often enough, during the course of the day, as well as ensuring they are drinking adequate amounts of clean water.

Country specific plans to educate, prevent and treat undernourishment and all malnutrition related issues must be put into place. Nonetheless the fight to end hunger is not one based merely on food, it is one based on sustainability and nutrition, and therefore we cannot merely send food aid in an effort to solve this problem. While food aid is seen as an immediate need, it cannot be the end of the solution if we are to find sustainable ways out of poverty. Thus feeding programs alone are not enough, political will combined with agricultural investments, community education and training programs must follow, especially in regards to small scale farming programs, if we are to see a significant drop in malnutrition in these countries.

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

According to UNICEF, more than 30% of children in developing countries – about 600 million – live on less than $1 a day. Every 3.6 seconds someone dies from starvation, most often a child under the age of five.

According to Ritu Sharma, head of Women Thrive Worldwide, women are most vulnerable to malnutrition and communicable disease. “Women are often subjected to assaults and violence in refugee camps, and forced to make difficult choices about how to best care for their families under impossible circumstances,” says Sharma, who has lived on $1/day to demonstrate the extreme level of poverty at which billions live.  Sharma tried living on a dollar a day in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Burkina Faso.  You can read about her experiences here.

As most of us now prepare for the holidays, including our yearly spending sprees, the United States Congress is looking to make cuts. Federal budget debates for 2012 have already heated-up and one of the pending cuts includes vital programs that protect impoverished women and children. This is true even though poverty-focused international assistance represents less than one half of one percent of our budget.

Sadly, in a post earlier this year, Political Will a Must to End Child Malnutrition,  I stated that, “the issues leading to child malnutrition are often created by a lack of political will, and yet political will is required to end this problem. Pressure for change must come not only from within countries suffering, but also from the international community. We should continue to evaluate cases of success to aid current, new, and emerging leaders if we are to see the end of child malnutrition in our lifetime.”  The idea that the US is now considering cutting funding for such necessary programs is shocking to say the least.  It remains clear that efforts around the globe to tackle the food crisis and seek a sustainable end to child malnutrition and poverty need to see an increase in political will. This is necessary to ensure that both funding and sustainable practices are put into place at all levels. We must invest in the rights of women and children if we are to see an end to poverty. By investing in a child’s health, nutrition, education, development, and gender equality, we will ensure a healthier, more literate and more productive society. Through investments in the basic rights of women and children we will see stronger communities, increased democracy and equality. This is an investment that we as a global society will all benefit from. Take a stand and write your Representative today; tell them we cannot cut this crucial funding out of the budget.

Poverty is like a disease, as it is transmitted from one generation to the next; until we put an end to this disease it will continue to spread and claim the lives of millions of innocent children.  Let’s stop poverty in its tracks before it becomes a plague that consumes an entire generation of children.

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

The powerful video seeks to show how the end of famine is within our grasp. One.org is pushing the video campaign across all social media avenues to engage the public to take action.  In succession to the video’s distribution, One.org will be delivering an associated petition with tens of thousands of names to members of the United States Congress, calling on them to fully fund programs like Feed the Future and help break the cycle of famine for good.

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

IRIN just published an article entitled, Political commitment “key to cutting malnutrition”, where they asked Andres Mejia Acosta of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK whether he thought the leaders who had managed to push down malnutrition rates were in fact now reaping a political reward. Mejia Acosta said the answer was a mixed one,  “In Peru the regional presidents had perhaps drawn more political capital from it than mayors, and Garcia had not stood for re-election.” As a governor told me, “In the past politicians didn’t care about issues like nutrition, because children don’t vote, but now they have realized that their mothers do.’”  Mejia Acosta worked on what he calls “the Peruvian Surprise;” after 10 years of very little progress combating the issue, malnutrition rates plummeted post-2006 due to policy and political interventions.

Care and Action Against Hunger/Action Contre le Faim, together with researchers from the Oakland Institute in the US, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK and Spain’s Tripode Proyectos recently published the report, Under Nutrition: What Works?: A review of policy and practice.  The report looked at countries who had significant success in decreasing malnutrition. They found that countries with a political will and leadership commitment in addition to citizens prepared to lobby  for the cause, that took a multi-sector approach, by “tackling poverty in a wider sense, not just malnutrition alone, and often using cash transfers and social protection programs to do it,” had the highest sustainable success. These countries also found success by increasing the communication 0f governmental departments and NGOs, encouraging them to work together and end program duplication, thereby increasing resources.

The report is part one of a multiphase study examining individual success stories combating malnutrition. The review argues that, by studying these successes, “we can aim to derive lessons and examples of good practice that can be implemented across other countries.”  It is fitting that the study is emerging when the focus is on the famine in the Horn of Africa, a disaster that has left many feeling helpless, as if action is too late or futile due to a lack of political will.

Nutrition experts say governments are not investing enough to prevent and treat malnutrition in women and children in poor countries.  “The amount donors have given to combating malnutrition is lamentable,” said Saul Morris, one of the authors of a series of reports on child survival published recently by The Lancet medical journal (IRIN). The Lancet reports highlight that one of the biggest failings is that “‘governments often treat malnutrition separately to reducing poverty, according to Morris, so that progress on malnutrition indicators are not used to measure poverty reduction.”

Recently, I published the piece Are Politics to Blame for the Deaths of 30,000 Children in Somalia?  The true cause of the famine is not just drought and poor harvest,  but the issue of lack of political will continues to be difficult to address.  While the international parties ignore or debate the key facts and realities, children continue to live in needless malnutrition. Nonetheless, despite reports that political will is the key strategy necessary to bring a sustainable end to child malnutrition, the solutions are not simple, especially in developing and conflict ridden countries such as Somalia.  In Somalia, many believe the famine is largely a political creation, due to factions that have actively prevented food and other aid from reaching drought victims. However, the political commitment to end the problem is difficult.  The current famine is centered in Southern Somalia, where a failing government sits idly by, while parts of the country are controlled by al-Shabaab, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qa‘ida. The problem has been compounded as Kenya has been refusing to let people cross into northern Kenya to seek safety and aid.

The issues leading to child malnutrition are often created by a lack of political will, and yet political will is required to end this problem. Pressure for change must come not only from within countries suffering, but also from the international community. We should continue to evaluate cases of success to aid current, new, and emerging leaders if we are to see the end of child malnutrition in our lifetime.

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

As the blood-spattered violence of the drug war takes over the headlines, many Mexican men, women, and children confront the slow and silent violence of starvation. The latest reports show that the number of people living in “food poverty” (the inability to purchase the basic food basket) rose from 18 million in 2008 to 20 million by late 2010.

About one-fifth of Mexican children currently suffer from malnutrition. An innovative measurement applied by the National Institute for Nutrition registers a daily count of 728,909 malnourished children under five for October 18, 2011. Government statistics report that 25 percent of the population does not have access to basic food.

Since the 2008 food crisis, there has been a three percent rise in the population without adequate access to food. The number of children with malnutrition is 400,000 kids above the goal for this year. Newborns show the highest indices of malnutrition, indicating that the tragedy begins with maternal health.

The dramatic change in Mexican eating habits since NAFTA is not only reflected in the millions who go to bed hungry. On the other side of the scale, Mexico has in just a decade and a half become second only to the United States worldwide in morbid obesity. Child obesity, overweight, and diabetes now constitute major health problems, alongside the more traditional problem of hunger.

It’s not that the rich are getting too fat and the poor too thin, although inequality plays a role in the erosion of healthy diets for all. Fatness no longer represents abundance. It is the poor who drink cheap Coca Cola when they do not have access to potable water or who give their kids a bag of potato chips when local fresh food is no longer available. The International Journal of Obesity finds that worldwide the spread of what they call “the Western diet” (“high in saturated fats, sugar, and refined foods but low in fiber) has meant that “the burden of obesity is shifting towards the poor.” The NAFTA generation reflects the paradigm so eloquently described by food researcher and activist Raj Patel of “stuffed and starved”.

With another food crisis looming due to rising international prices, Mexico could face food riots as well as the spread of starvation and its consequences over the coming year.

Unless the riots turn violent or spark more widespread social upheaval as they did in Arab countries, it’s not likely that the news media will pay any attention.

NAFTA’s Food (In)security Model

Something has gone terribly wrong. The nation that was slated for prosperity when it signed NAFTA has become an international example of severe structural problems in the food chain, from how it produces its food to what and how much (or how little) it consumes.

Mexican malnutrition has its roots in the way NAFTA and other neoliberal programs forced the nation to move away from producing its own basic foods to a “food security” model. “Food security” posits that a country is secure as long as it has sufficient income to import its food. It separates farm employment from food security and ignores unequal access to food within a country.

The idea of food security based on market access comes directly from the main argument behind NAFTA of “comparative advantage.” Simply stated, economic efficiency dictates that each country should devote its productive capacity to what it does best and trade liberalization will guarantee access across borders.

Under the theory of comparative advantage, most of Mexico was deemed unfit to produce its staple food crop, corn, since its yields were way below the average for its northern neighbor and trade partner. Therefore, Mexico should turn to corn imports and devote its land to crops where it supposedly had a comparative advantage, such as counter-seasonal and tropical fruits and vegetables.

Sounds simple. Just pick up three million inefficient corn producers (and their families) and move them into manufacturing or assembly where their cheap labor constitutes a comparative advantage. The cultural and human consequences of declaring entire peasant and indigenous communities obsolete were not a concern in this equation.

Seventeen years after NAFTA, some two million farmers have been forced off their land by low prices and the dismantling of government supports. They did not find jobs in industry. Instead most of them became part of a mass exodus as the number of Mexican migrants to the United States rose to half a million a year. In the first few years of NAFTA, corn imports tripled and the producer price fell by half.

Conversion to other crops turned out to take years in most cases. Prices were volatile and harvests unreliable. It was not feasible at all on many small, often rocky plots where corn guarantees a subsistence diet for farm families. Niche markets failed to grow to much more than 2 percent of total agricultural production.

The areas that adapted successfully to industrial agriculture and agroexport crops are characterized by flagrant violation of the labor rights of migrant farm workers, widespread pollution and water waste, and extreme concentration of land and resources.

For the hungry, this means that prices set on the international market determine who eats and who starves. Mexican consumers now pay more for tortillas and food in general. Price hikes on the international market push basic food out of reach for the millions of poor in the country.

Food Dependency

In post-NAFTA Mexico, 42 percent of the food consumed comes in from abroad. Before NAFTA, the country spent $1.8 billion dollars on food imports. It now spends a whopping $24 billion. Rural researcher Ernesto Ladrón de Guevara notes that in some basic foods, the dependency on imports is dramatic: 80 percent in rice, 95 percent in soybeans, 33 percent in beans, and 56 percent in wheat. The country is the world’s number-one importer in the world of powdered milk. NAFTA decimated Mexico’s once-thriving dairy sector, and the market takeover by transnational powdered milk is linked to the crisis in infant malnutrition.

Mexico imports 33 percent of its consumption, a figure that belies the reliance on imports because the sheer volume of consumption is so large. Ladrón de Guevara states that it has gone from importing around 250,000 tons before NAFTA to 13 million tons. Transnational traders often favor imports over national production because of the attractive credit arrangements offered by the United States, making it “a double business—importing corn and money.”

The U.S. department of agriculture estimates that if current trends continue Mexico will acquire 80 percent of its food from other countries (mostly the United States). The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization calls a country food dependent when the cost of its imports exceeds 25 percent of total exports. Peasant farmer organizations have criticized the definition as ludicrous in an oil-producing country that nonetheless has seen serious erosion in its capacity to feed its people and guarantee access to basic foods for all.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

The corporate takeover of Mexico’s food system has led to the food and health catastrophe. Transnational food corporations not only import freely into Mexican food markets, they are now the producers, exporters, and importers all in one, operating inside the country.

Since NAFTA, corporations have gobbled up human and natural resources on an almost unbelievable scale. Livestock production has moved from small farms for local markets to Tyson, Smithfield, and Pilgrims Pride. The massive use and contamination of water and land has led to health and environmental disasters across the country. Millions of jobs have been lost to concentration and industrialized farming methods.

Take the case of Corn Products International (CPI). The transnational filed  a NAFTA claim against the Mexican government in 2003, claiming a loss to its business due to a tax levied on high fructose corn syrup in beverages. Mexico’s reason for imposing the tax was to save a sugarcane industry that provided jobs for thousands of citizens and played a crucial economic role in many regions. The government was also frustrated by its failure under NAFTA to access the highly protected U.S. sugar market.

A 2008 NAFTA tribunal ruled that Mexico had to pay $58.4 million to CPI. The government paid up on January 25, 2011. CPI posted $3.7 billion dollars in net sales the year of the decision. The fine paid by the Mexican government could have provided a year’s worth of the basic food basket to more than 50,000 poor families.

CPI’s wholly owned subsidiary Arancia Corn Products is among the most powerful food transnationals operating in the country, along with Maseca/Archers Daniel Midland and Cargill. Large agribusiness companies allegedly played a key role in the 2007 tortilla crisis by hoarding harvest as the international price went up, artificially drying up the national market and selling at nearly double the price they paid for the harvest. That crisis brought tens of thousands of poor Mexicans out into the streets to protest a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas.

NAFTA and other FTAs give corporations the power to define what we eat, what we buy at the store, who will have a job and who won’t, and whether a village sustained by local food production will survive or witness the end of generations of livelihoods.

Feed the Hungry, Fix the System

Mexican organizations have begun to come together after years of divisions to respond to the food crisis and fix the badly broken system. They recently succeeded in reforming the Mexican constitution to include the right to food. Now the battle is on to adapt the rural budget to make that right a reality.

Small farmer organizations have joined with family farm organizations in the United States and Canada to call for the renegotiation of NAFTA to remove basic foods and agricultural production from the agreement. They recognize, though, that the Obama administration’s about-face in its stated commitments to fair trade reforms have left little political space for change.

Instead, peasant organizations in all three countries are looking to grassroots efforts and movements to fix the food system before the crisis worsens. As Mexican organizations struggle for programs to address threats to food and agriculture, U.S. organizations are seeing an opportunity to join their demands to the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country. One of the grievances listed in the OWS Declaration of the New York City General Assembly reads: “They (large corporations) have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.” Food activists are now bringing issues of corporate concentration in food, commodity speculation and price hikes, and free trade to the general protests.

Corporate control of the food system locked in by NAFTA not only starves people in Mexico. It locks in a profoundly unhealthy food system for the entire region. No one expects the situation to get better by itself. As the crisis deepens, citizen movements are again heating up and seeking each other out across borders to protect their health, their livelihoods and their rights. In the future, what we eat, how we eat, and if we eat will depend on their efforts.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

As journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote in The New York Times earlier this year, “Out of fear, farmers do not try new methods that can bring them higher yields. They cannot take out loans to buy the drought-resistant seeds and tools to bring a bigger harvest, because they cannot be sure of repaying the loans. They need to know they will have money left over to feed their families and plant again should the harvest fail, so they invest less in farming. ”

Recognizing this, several years ago Oxfam launched a program in Ethiopia to try to break this cycle, This insurance product is designed to be commercially viable (i.e., risk-based pricing) and to avoid subsidizing premiums as has been done in the past.

AUTHOR: Richard Matthews
URL: http://thegreenmarket.blogspot.com/
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Since July, more than 150,000 Somalis have left the provinces of the country’s central region—Bay, Bakool, Hiran, Lower and Middle Shabelle—seeking refuge in Mogadishu. This large-scale population displacement is the result of poor agricultural production, loss of livestock because of drought, increasing prices, and perpetual insecurity. Deka, a 26 year-old woman, left Kuntawarey district in Lower Shabelle after her cows died. “I travelled with my son on the top of a truck for two days to reach Mogadishu and find my cousins in the Barwako camp,” she says. “People from MSF told me that my son was suffering from malnutrition, so I went with them to their hospital. My son is starting to get better, and I am, too, because I am fed here.”

This kind of exodus poses a host of health problems. But measles currently is the greatest threat and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is mobilized to halt the spread of a disease that is particularly fatal for children. Since early August, MSF has vaccinated more than 40,000 children under the age of 15. “That sounds like a lot, but if we are to have any hope of stopping the epidemic, we’d have to vaccinate at least 10 times that number,” explains MSF medical manager, Dr. Andrias Karel Keiluhu. “Logistical and security constraints limit our goals.”

Humanitarian aid organizations are struggling to access the most affected areas because of the ongoing conflict between the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which is assisted by troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and the armed Al-Shabaab group. That is why Somalis are migrating in such great numbers, hoping to find aid in Kenya, Ethiopia and the Somali capital.

Like Deka, most of the new arrivals move into existing camps, swelling their already sizable populations. Others have settled in the few unoccupied spots remaining in the city. Their makeshift housing, assembled from bits of wood and plastic, is scattered among the ruins of the capital. More than 200 sites of varying size have been identified.

Deploying aid in this patchwork of shantytowns is particularly complicated. The camps empty out during the day as residents leave in search of food. “Food distributions are still irregular and inadequate,” says MSF program coordinator Eymeric Laurent-Gascon. “Some of the displaced persons have not received any food since they arrived and are relying on help from those around them. Several NGOs have set up feeding centers with food purchased on local markets, but this has led to significant inflation. If prices continue to rise, the entire population of the city will soon be unable to feed itself without external assistance.”

The percentage of children suffering from malnutrition may vary from 5% to 50% across displaced persons’ camps, depending on how long ago they arrived and their access to distributions of food and water. The most recent arrivals are generally in the worst shape. In Mogadishu, MSF is managing four therapeutic feeding centers where the most serious cases are hospitalized. In September, nearly 500 children were treated there. In addition, mothers who come to any of the dozen MSF outpatient treatment centers receive a weekly supply of ready-to-use therapeutic foods, composed of peanut butter enriched with essential nutrients, for their young children. To date, more than 5,000 children have benefited from these products.

Mogadishu’s population is currently estimated at more than 1 million, half being displaced persons. Medical needs far exceed available health services and more people continue arriving daily. The displaced populations are living in precarious health conditions, their immune systems already weakened by poor nutrition. Many have never been vaccinated. Infectious diseases – including cholera, pneumonia, dengue fever and malaria – are common in the city and the rainy season, which will be begin in October, could increase their spread.

Though a massive truck bomb killed dozens of people in the capital on October 4, the situation there, relative to times past, has been fairly stable of late. “That could change, so it’s ever more urgent to provide as much as assistance as possible in the near term, says MSF head of mission Thierry Goffeau. New humanitarian actors have arrived. It is now critical that everyone work together to identify and meet the population’s needs, while remaining very watchful. The deadly attack reminded us that periods of calm are often temporary in Mogadishu.”

AUTHOR: Shout Africa
URL: http://www.shout-africa.com
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