Africa

Corn, sorghum and other cereal grains are selling at record prices in East Africa, where drought has shriveled crops, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. High food prices "are severely constraining food access for large numbers of households with alarming consequences for food insecurity," said an FAO official.

"Damages to crops appear to be irreversible and rangeland conditions remain generally poor" in east Africa, following scant rainfall during the October-December rainy season, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in a special alert that describes support for agriculture as an urgent need. "Food insecurity is expected to significantly deteriorate by early 2017."

Hunger experts at an FAO meeting in Rome said that if women farmers had the same access as men to land, tools, and credit, crop yields would rise by at least a third and there would be 150 million fewer hungry people in the world, Reuters reports.

After three years of drought and crop failures, nearly 850,000 people in Madagascar are experiencing alarming levels of hunger, with 330,000 of them on the brink of famine, says the Guardian. The outlet reported huge funding shortfalls for hunger relief work in seven countries across southern Africa.

The UN International Labor Organization estimates 3.5 million people around the world work in forced labor conditions in agriculture, including forestry and fishing, says Civil Eats in a story on slavery in the food chain. "This means that forced labor has played a role in the supply chains of many of the most popular food and drinks."

One of the poorest nations on earth, Liberia has made palm oil a key part of its campaign to create jobs and reduce poverty. The head of the country's National Investment Commission says the palm oil sector could bring employment to up to 100,000 Liberians, says the Guardian, but "there was little consideration in this process of those who lived on the land or had the right to it."

Countries must start figuring out how much food they waste if they’re going to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal of halving global food waste and lowering food loss by 2030, says a report out by Champions 12.3, a coalition of government, business, and research organizations.

Africa accounts for 28 of the 36 countries worldwide that need food aid, says the FAO in its quarterly Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. Drought reduced harvests in North Africa and in southern Africa, more than offsetting improvements in East and West Africa and pulling the continent's grain output to a below-normal level.

Biointensive farming, which includes close plant spacing, use of seeds from plants that have been naturally pollinated and specific food-to-compost crop ratios, "produces far greater yields than conventional agriculture while using far less land and water," Ensia magazine reports, and is especially well-suited to small-scale farmers in Latin America and Africa looking for low-cost, low-tech solutions to grow food.

The worst drought in 35 years in southern Africa will imperil the food supply of 40 million people until next March, when crops planted in coming months are ripe for harvest, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. "Widespread crop failure has exacerbated chronic malnutrition in the region," said FAO, which appealed for $109 million to equip farmers and grazers ahead of the growing season.

With 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and 10 percent of its renewable freshwater resources, “Africa’s immense agricultural potential has long been a keen point of discussion among agronomists and global decision-makers,” writes Quartz Africa. But the continent faces a host of issues in reaching its potential.

President Obama signed the bipartisan Global Food Security Act of 2016 yesterday, steering $7 billion toward agricultural development and hunger-relief efforts around the world, and ensuring that both public and private operations would continue to work together to fund these efforts in Africa and other food-insecure regions.

More than 60 million people worldwide, including 40 million in eastern and southern Africa, are at risk of hunger due to the El Niño weather pattern that is now waning, said leaders of three UN agencies.

The worldwide spike in food prices nearly a decade ago set off a land-buying surge by wealthy investors and nations wanting to shore up their food supply by acquiring cropland in developing nations. The surge was decried by critics as land grabs that would displace small farmers and herders. "The emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse," says the nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN).

Malawi is facing a food crisis as the southern Africa region wrestles with drought and high temperatures. Due to record high winter temperatures hitting southern Africa during planting season, Malawi’s corn production fell by 12 percent in April leaving the country short of 1 million tonnes of grain during its worst food crisis in a decade, The East African said.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest and most-populous country, needs help feeding refugees fleeing armed conflict in the northeastern corner of the country, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in a quarterly report on food insecurity around the world.

"Extreme poverty, child mortality, and hunger all fell by around half between 1990 and 2015," thanks to the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000, says the International Food Policy Research Institute in its 2016 Global Food Policy Report.

Drought in southern Africa has "significantly dampened production prospects, with severe negative implications for food security in the sub-region," says the FAO's quarterly Crop Prospects and Food Situation report.