The macroeconomics of the rising price of staples are complex, but its effect on the lives of three women interviewed by Oxfam America is simple: they feel it every day.
For María Antonia León, or “Toñita”, life has never been easy. She remembers a time when she earned $3 to $4 a day selling tamales, pastries and snacks from her food cart and was able to buy weekly staples to feed her family of five. With this income, she could get six pounds of beans, half a pound of cheese, half a pound of cream, four pounds of rice, eggs, a chicken, and other basics.
“Before, with $20, I was able to fill a shopping cart. Now I can’t… I spend $40 and it’s not enough. I can’t even fill a shopping basket because everything is so expensive. Beans are $2.50, and cooking oil for 15 days is $2. We just can’t manage. This current crisis is really tough,” says Toñita. She doesn’t know how she will find the money to buy shoes or clothes.
But Toñita has now found a way to provide her family with nourishing food: Inspired by Saving for Change, she has started a garden and is raising chickens for their eggs. Saving for Change is an Oxfam program that encourages women to use the capital generated through their savings groups to participate in projects that help them achieve a sustainable livelihood. One such project seeks to promote women’s production capacity, entrepreneurial, and self-reliance skills by helping them establish vegetable gardens.
With her garden, Toñita has a new means to feed her family and avoid paying the high prices at the market. The cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and mustard greens she is growing are providing her family with the vitamins and proteins they weren’t getting before. And now she is teaching other women in her community how to do the same thing. The best part is she sells her extra produce at below market prices to her neighbors facing similar difficulties.
Ana Elizabeth Barrera works at a market in the city of Santa Tecla. She cooks and sells prepared foods, and therefore intimately knows the issue of rising food prices. Ana Elizabeth has seen the price of staples climb steadily over the past five years, but notes an accelerated rise of 60 to 70 percent in the past year, most notably with oil, rice, beans and sugar.
“Six to eight months ago I would invest $100 for oil, rice and other basics, and today I am spending between $150-160 which buys the same amount. Consequently, I have to raise my prices, which means that sales have gone down,” says Ana Elizabeth. She has lost 40 percent of her clientele and has had to let go one of her two employees.
Iris Madrid finds herself in a vulnerable position after losing her job a few weeks ago. Although her income was modest, it was stable and allowed her to buy basic items for her home and support her three children. Now, without a salary and facing rising food costs, she depends on her mother who sells beauty products via catalog.
“If there is detergent, then there is no soap. Or if we have soap, then we have no detergent. If we have beans, then we won’t be eating cheese. If we have cheese, we won’t be eating beans… It hurts because when you have children and they ask you for something, you can’t give it to them,” explains Iris. There are days when all they eat are the mangos from the tree outside her house.
Saving for Change is a program that is growing every day. Since its launch in 2005, it has grown to more than 488,000 members in five countries. The hope is that it will continue to grow and reach people like Ana Elizabeth and Iris, like it has reached Toñita.
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Millions of people in the region—including Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso-- have confronted food shortages as a consequence of erratic rains in 2008 and 2009 that led to poor harvests, withered pastures, and a lack of water. Widespread poverty has compounded those challenges.
For many, the difficulty in the weeks leading up to the this year’s harvest in October and November is particularly acute as they have exhausted not only their food supplies but have sold off assets, such as livestock, in an effort to feed their families.
While Niger has been at the epicenter of the crisis, with about seven million people facing hunger—almost half its population--forecasters are now predicting a solid harvest for the country, even as flooding wiped out some fields and killed many heads of livestock. And a good distribution of rains in Burkina Faso has meant the crops are growing well there, also.
But robust harvests won’t ease the strain for many families who have gone deep into debt trying to feed themselves. One good harvest will not be enough for them to recover.
Additionally, some families have not been able to plant at all: They had no choice but to eat the seeds they intended to sow.
For herders who rely mostly on their animals for food and income, the rains have restored the grass in their pastures, which in turn has improved the health of their livestock. As cattle and goats grow stronger again, their value goes up, giving owners more purchasing power in the local markets.
Families who earn their living from crops grown in rain-fed fields, however, continue to struggle.
“For non-pastoralist communities who depend on a good harvest, we have not yet seen the end,” said Oxfam’s West Africa emergency coordinator, Philippe Conraud, speaking to the IRIN news agency about Mali. “We are still in the peak of crisis, and emergency activities need to continue.”
The problems in Chad are particularly worrisome. About 60 percent of the households, or 1.6 million people, in the western part of the country are grappling with a severe food crisis. For those suffering from malnutrition, access to care can be a challenge: Some patients have to travel more than 120 miles to reach health facilities.
The prices of basic commodities in the markets continue to rise and overall food prices are at least 35 percent higher than the five-year average. Additionally, with the arrival of the rainy season, floods have affected more than 100,000 people in nine regions of Chad, destroying homes and wrecking crops. And now there is a new threat: cholera. Hundreds of cases have been reported.
Oxfam, which has helped more than 600,000 people snared by the crisis, is calling for a scaled-up response now—and over the long-term.
“Many people have lost everything due to the severity of the crisis. They have lost their livestock, their livelihoods and are now in excessive debt,” says Dawit Beyene, Oxfam America’s deputy director of humanitarian response. “We need flexible and predictable funding to support the development of national social protection systems and sustainable livelihoods, and to increase the provision of essential services to prevent future crises.”
In Chad, Oxfam has been helping people in the Sila and Guéra regions by distributing food and running agricultural and livelihood support projects. In Niger, the ganecy has organized the distribution of food and fodder, provided cereals at subsidized prices, distributed seeds, and bought weakened livestock from herders at above-market prices, distributing the meat for free to the poorest families. And in Mali Oxfam has been distributing food and animal feed as well.
“The situation in West Africa may seem impossibly complex and difficult to solve but if only the international community would invest in long-term predictable development work we could make sure families are a lot less vulnerable to shocks in the future,” says Raphael Sindaye, Oxfam’s deputy regional director in West Africa.
]]>We know some aid, including from Oxfam, has been getting through in recent weeks and months. But we also know the international aid effort has been too slow – funds from donors have been committed late, and aid on the ground isn’t coming through fast enough. As the people here face their toughest three months until harvest time in October, there’s a desperate need for international political engagement to ramp up the speed and the scale of the response.
In Niger’s capital Niamey, a gentle-seeming city of sandy-mud colored low houses and a population of around 800,000 people, there are few immediate signs of the food crisis. There are small food stalls along many of the tree-lined, dusty streets and the “petit marche” – or small market – is crammed with stalls selling food and other items. But even in the capital, many people are too poor to pay for sufficient food and the picture in the countryside is much much worse.
We drove two hours from Niamey, along a rough dirt track through the semi-arid, mostly flat and desolate landscape. It’s stony and sandy with a few short dry-looking trees and bushes, though some are turning green where a bit of rain has started to fall. We see painfully thin cattle, goats and donkeys, their ribs visible as we drive by. Men, women and children are hard at work in some patches of land, planting seeds by hand to take advantage of any rain that has fallen. It’s hard work, and often undone again by sudden harsh desert winds.
We stop briefly in the main town in the area, Ouallam, and talk to a serious, welcoming official there, who explains that more than 200 of the 300 or so villages in this area are facing severe food shortages. Due to the drought, thousands of animals have died or are too thin to be sold for a decent price or even to provide a good meal for the herders.
The situation is as bad as the deep crisis of 2005, our host tells us—and worse, even, because people have less money now than they did then. But at least speculators have not managed to drive the prices as high as they did five years ago. And, importantly, this time around the new Nigerien government has recognized the crisis and invited donors and aid organizations like Oxfam to support them in tackling the problem. Now, some aid has arrived – but much more will be needed in the coming months.
Driving on to the nearby village of Tondi Kiwindi, we find a small muddy river flooding the road into the village. Our driver wades across to make sure our vehicle won’t get stuck and we plow through. Tondi Kiwindi is a small community of mud-brick rectangular houses, quiet in the midday heat. The local village leader welcomes us and tells us about the difficulties here and in the surrounding villages.
He talks about how many animals have died, about how little food villagers have, about the difficulties of surviving the next three months until the harvest. The rains here are a month late, though further north they have started.
The village leader thanks us for the work we’ve done with a local aid group to buy sick and thin animals at better prices than villagers can get in the markets, and to provide animal feed and other support such as cash for work programs. He tells us that the women, especially, have taken advantage of the opportunity to earn some income through the programs as many of the men have migrated away to towns to look for work. They’ll return to till and plant the fields when the rains start.
But when the rain really comes, says our host, the river we crossed to get into the village will rise and there will be no access to the community. Can we help, he asks us.
It’s a story across a lot of the region: rains are desperately needed to ensure a good harvest this year, but until October when the crops are ripe, rains can block access and make delivery of aid much harder or impossible. And the rains lower the temperature a little—bringing death to thousands of weakened animals.
In a five-mile ride across the desert from Tondi Kiwindi, we come to a smaller village called Ko Kaina. The situation we find here is utterly desperate: The villagers talk to us of famine and question whether they can survive to the autumn.
We sit with four women who tell us they have nothing left to eat at all. They say that this year is especially bad. Last year at least the animals had enough to eat, but now the cows and goats are dead or dying. In hard times, their tradition is to share—neighbors helping neighbors—but now no one has anything to share.
“Everyone is down, down, down,” they say. “Our stomachs are empty.”
Their last source of food is a small, hard round green pea called “wanza.” It has a bitter taste, but villagers eat it when there is nothing else to consume. To find the wanza, the women set out from the village at 5 a.m. walking miles in their hunt. They ask me to taste one of the peas to see how bitter and sour it is; the unpleasant taste stays in my mouth for an hour. The peas first need drying in the sun then soaking several times in water before they become at all possible to digest.
They show us their only other food – a small bowl of cooked leaves from short small trees that grow in the dry earth nearer to the village. A woman puts a small amount in her mouth and mimics being sick, to show me how ill and malnourished they are on this diet. A short distance away, a small group of children stares at us hoping, I think, that we have brought relief. They are thin and listless.
The women explain that their animals have been weak and dying for months now and no longer produce milk. Some are even too thin to slaughter for food. A few days back, the women tell us, the villagers killed one weak calf before it died. They needed it for food. But four children became ill from eating the meat and had to be taken to a larger village nearby for medical attention. That cost money the families didn’t had and had to borrow—leaving them in debt, too.
People are so weak, the women explain to us, that after a few minutes working in the fields – vital work – they are already too tired to keep going.
“We are weak and dying like our animals,” they tell us. “If it goes on like this, some of us will die and some God will keep alive ‘til the next harvest.”
Oxfam has launched an emergency program to provide support to 800,000 people across Niger, Mali, and Chad. In Niger, the organization is helping 400,000 people by distributing food and supplies to the poorest households. Oxfam is also buying weak livestock at above-market rates to help herders who need to sell some of their animals. Meat from the livestock is being distributed to some of the most vulnerable households. In Mali, the organization will help 200,000 people by distributing food as well as fodder for livestock. And in Chad, distributions of food and seeds are accompanying agriculture support projects, with a goal of helping 200,000 people.
But even Mejia was unable to put a favorable spin on his situation at harvest time in late 2009: after he’d planted his corn and beans in his field high above the languid Chixoy River, now flowing at a very low level, his crops had failed, owing to lack of rain. Most years he can grow 22 quintales (about 2,200 pounds) of corn. This year, Mejia says he got about a tenth of that.
“We could see the corn cobs, but when we opened them up, many were totally empty,” Mejia says, standing in his field. “We got almost nothing this year.”
Mejia did everything he could short of making it rain, including fertilizing his field twice at great expense. But now that the 42-year-old farmer has harvested nearly everything, the field is overgrown with bright yellow weeds. Some call them flor de muerto (flower of death).
Mejia says at this point he is done trying to grow food and must wait for the next planting season in June 2010.
“We hope there will be rain,” he says. “Otherwise, we may die.”
Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition among children under five in Latin America: nearly 50 percent, according to the World Food Program. For indigenous children the malnutrition rate is even higher: close to 70 percent. On a recent visit to Mejia’s area, Francisco Enriquez, a sustainable livelihood specialist for Oxfam in Guatemala, found that most of the families had lost between 80 and 100 percent of their crops.
The hills above the Chixoy River are gray and dry at harvest time, with dark rocks visible through thin soils on the exposed slopes. It’s a tough place to farm, and Mejia’s family is just one of about 350,000 families the government of Guatemala said are at risk when it declared a food emergency in September 2009. Most vulnerable are those in central Guatemela’s “dry corridor,” where Mejia lives in the department of Baja Verapaz. His village, Xinacati II, is just one of the hundreds of communities—many composed of indigenous people—that are struggling to grow enough food to survive.
This food shortage is occurring in a country of luxurious green that exports millions in sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and coffee. Despite this abundance, poor Guatemalans, who are mostly indigenous Maya people, regularly face chronic food shortages. There is plenty of food in stores, but poor people can’t afford it.
Since the Spanish colonization of Central America, indigenous Maya people have been systematically moved off the most productive farmlands to arid areas and steep hillsides. In Mejia’s case, his community and several others were originally in the Chixoy River valley but were involuntarily relocated in the 1980s to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Most of the flattest, best land is used to grow export crops like coffee and sugar cane and, more recently, biofuel crops.
“The country is producing less and less corn and beans each year,” says Enriquez. He says the government “is not pushing for spending that will specifically benefit small farmers. … They need to invest in producing food; otherwise, when there is a drought or a flood, it becomes a dramatic crisis.”
The lack of rain in Baja Verapaz could be the type of dramatic crisis Enriquez fears.
Most of the families with significant crop losses last fall have few options. In order to earn money to buy the food they need to survive, many men from communities like Xinacati II will migrate to distant coffee and sugar cane plantations, where they will work for a few months, returning occasionally to bring money to their families.
If things are really tough, entire families may relocate temporarily. Mejia says he can pick more coffee beans with the help of his wife and five kids than he could alone.
“We would like people to have more options than just migration,” says Gonzalez. Oxfam is working with the Association of Community Health Services, known by its Spanish initials ASECSA (where Gonzalez works), as well as the Training Institute for Sustainable Development, to help farmers survive the winter. They will provide seeds and tools to help families grow vegetables to improve their nutrition and they will help families with feed and veterinary care for small livestock like chickens, pigs, and ducks. Oxfam is also helping fund ASECSA’s network of health promoters to provide nutritional counseling for families with young children to reduce child malnutrition and death.
This project will also support a range of community improvements: paying local people to work on irrigation systems and other infrastructure to help farmers when they plant next spring; producing organic fertilizer and insecticide to save money and protect the soil; and teaching farmers about native seeds to reduce costs and increase production of corn, beans, and peanuts.
“These things will help people after our project is over,” says Enriquez, who has worked with the UN and Oxfam in Guatemala for 10 years. “They will be better positioned to survive another drought.” The agriculture assistance and community service activities will help nearly a thousand families. Oxfam has committed $266,000 to the project.
“We tried asking others for the money for this but did not get a positive response,” Gonzalez says in the ASECSA office in Rabinal, two hours by walking and driving from Xinacati II. “So it is perfect that Oxfam is working with us. We are concentrating on the worst-hit area, and if it works, we will replicate it in others.”
Some of the factors contributing to the poor harvests in Guatemala in 2009:
But a hungry child exists in a larger context: if we nourish communities, they can nourish their own children.
The woman on our cover, Fatou Doumbia, and other women in her village in Mali, pooled their resources last year. They set aside nearly a ton of millet as a defense against the hunger they’d seen as food prices spiked. Hers is another face of hunger: determined, resourceful.
After the last harvest, Oxfam reached out to supporters to respond to the food crisis. We’ve devoted much of this issue to looking at what communities have done to avoid the kinds of hardships they confronted. When people living in poverty are hit by a food crisis or natural disaster, they lack resources to tide them over.
Oxfam works to help people build their resilience. Let respect and hope fuel your efforts to support women like Doumbia.
]]>In a survey of the area in mid-October, Oxfam staff reported that many families had lost 80 to 100 percent of their harvest this year.
“There’s no food in this community,” Francisca’s aunt Margarita Rosales, 54, says.
Lack of rain in Guatemala has reduced harvests this year, pushing up food prices in stores and creating a crisis in poor communities. The government declared a food emergency in September.
Malnutrition and chronic food shortages are not unusual in Guatemala. Lack of investment in small-scale agriculture has reduced food production over the years, and the country now has the highest rate of malnutrition among children under five in Latin America: nearly 50 percent, according to the World Food Programme. The malnutrition rate for indigenous children is higher; close to 70 percent. The Famine Early Warning System warns that 350,000 families in Guatemala are at risk this year, especially in the south, east, and central regions of Guatemala’s “dry corridor."
Many men will finish their harvest and migrate to coffee- or sugar-cane producing parts of the country to work on large plantations to earn extra money. This year such income will be more crucial than ever, for farmers in Baja Verpaz, in central Guatemala.
“We would like people to have more options than just migration,” says Gloria Gonzalez, who works with the Association of Community Health Services, known by its Spanish initials ASECSA. Oxfam is working with ASECSA and the Training Institute for Sustainable Development (IEPADES) to help farmers in Baja Verapaz survive the coming winter. Oxfam is helping these organizations in the following areas.
Oxfam is committing $269,000 to the project, which will assist nearly one thousand families in Baja Verapaz.
]]>"Resuscitating Doha is essential to right the rigged rules of trade, but what's been simmering on the WTO stove will simply not deliver for poor countries, said Oxfam America president Raymond C. Offenheiser. "The financial crisis, which started in developed countries but is taking its worst toll on developing countries, should be the impetus for a change in course."
In a new report released today called "Empty Promises," Oxfam details how the Doha Round has become an exercise in prying open developing country markets rather than an effort to rebalance decades of unfair agricultural and industrial trade rules. In the midst of a global economic crisis, a food crisis, and a climate crisis, nations with the least blame and with the least capacity to cope with the consequent effects must not have to pay even more to enable their economies to develop, according to the report.
Over 50 million people stand to lose their jobs, remittances are collapsing, and growth in sub-Saharan Africa is predicted to fall by 70 percent this year trapping 90 million more people in poverty, because of the crisis. Food prices meanwhile remain high for poor consumers: by the end of 2008 a further 109 million people had been added to the ranks of hungry, topping 1 billion people worldwide. As the world experiences the sharpest drop in trade in 80 years, a "development" trade deal—as originally promised—remains crucial, according to Oxfam.
"Now is the time for WTO members to come back to the negotiating table, recognize that the current crisis provides an opportunity to address urgent development needs, and change the course of negotiations, much as they did nearly eight years ago in Doha," said Offenheiser. "At this time of desperate need for a change of course, the Doha Round has to step up to deliver on its development promise. There is little credit left for another failure."
The welcome political commitment from the G8 could lead to a fresh start to negotiations, but it cannot be business as usual. In the past eight years, developed countries have used the talks to continue to push to open up new export markets. Developing countries have resisted, saying they were promised a deal that would give them space to protect their farmers and new industries, an end to rich country trade-distorting agricultural subsidies, and more access to rich markets for their farmers and industries.
The widespread food price crisis has shown that food and livelihood security cannot depend solely on market forces. Development, rather than liberalization, has to be the central objective of negotiations and trade rules must respond to the needs of the most vulnerable people first and foremost, according to Oxfam. It is the responsibility of WTO member states to analyze the role of trade in the recent global crises so that the Doha negotiations take into account the new global context and contribute to a solution, rather than exacerbate the problem.
"What's on the table is no silver bullet since it continues to favor the richest and biggest farmers and industrialists in the US and Europe and sidelines the needs of the poor," said Offenheiser. "We have seen what can be done when countries find the resolve to avert problems at home, and this resolve must be translated to the multilateral trade agenda so that the much-needed conclusion of the Doha Round can be achieved in a manner that addresses developing country needs first and foremost."
]]>The report, "Investing in Poor Farmers Pays: Rethinking How to Invest in Agriculture," outlines the ramifications of a 75 percent drop in developing country agriculture aid over the last few decades, fundamentally weakening this vital sector. The report also reveals that two-thirds of the world's rural poor have been overlooked by what little investments have been made. More—and more wise investment—is needed, the agency said.
"Investment in developing country agriculture has fallen out of fashion over the last few decades, but it is a crucial part of the long-term solution to the food, financial and climate crises," said Oxfam report author Emily Alpert, noting that over one billion people around the world are now hungry.
Oxfam called on rich world leaders, particularly those meeting at G8 Summit in Italy next month, to push agricultural development assistance back to at least 1980-levels of around $20 billion from the paltry $5 billion currently invested. The report notes that some rich countries have of course not neglected their own farmers. In 2007 alone, EU agricultural spending was $130 billion and in the US $41 billion.
"A substantial increase in long-term agriculture investments is loose change compared to ongoing investments in rich countries or the trillions of dollars spent globally this year on the financial bail-out," said Alpert. "Strengthening the agricultural sectors of developing countries is a crucial part of the long-term solution to the world's food, financial and climate crises."
"Faltering public investment in agriculture over the last two decades was undoubtedly an underlying cause of poor people's vulnerability to the food crisis," said Alpert. "We cannot continue to chase hunger-related disasters. We need to deal with the underlying causes of hunger, vulnerability and poverty."
The report urged donors, national governments and private sector investors to invest more and more wisely in developing country agriculture, targeting investments towards people, particularly women, to encourage and support social and knowledge capital and enabling them to adopt environmentally sustainable farming methods.
"Women are key to food security," Alpert said. "Investing equitably in women's needs and building their capacity to productively engage in agriculture must be at the forefront any solution to improve agricultural growth and reduce poverty."
Oxfam also urged that donor funding must be predictable, transparent and untied. The agency also cautioned the use of any "one size approach," ensuring instead that investments are tailored to the conditions of specific locations, participatory and demand-driven. Special attention must be paid to farmers and herders in marginalized land, who often work in harsh and remote environments with inadequate access to markets and services for extension, credit and farming inputs, and fewer off-farm sources of employment. Such farmers and herders shoulder the burden of conserving crop biodiversity and managing some of the world's most fragile soils and could be critical allies in the fight against climate change.
"Despite perceived low returns on investing in marginalized areas by donors and the private sector, investing in developing country agriculture pays for itself by reducing poverty," said Alpert. "A healthy agricultural sector acts as a multiplier in local economies, leading eventually to higher wages and vibrant rural markets where farmers and workers spend their earnings."
]]>"The number of people on this planet who suffer from chronic hunger has climbed to almost one billion—one in every six—and it's likely to get worse because of the global economic crisis and climate change," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. "Congress should urgently pass this bill to not only address the ongoing humanitarian crisis, but also lay out long term responses that will reduce the vulnerability of poor people to the kinds of food price shocks we've seen in the last year."
The US approach to food security abroad has been uncoordinated across US agencies. The Global Food Security Act is the first attempt to provide a more comprehensive strategy for the US to address food insecurity abroad, make emergency responses more effective and build long-term food security by investing in agriculture. The legislation improves our emergency response to food crises and provides funding to assist poor countries promote food security and stimulate their rural economies.
"The spotlight may currently be on the financial crisis, but the food crisis is still very real and needs an urgent and coordinated response," said Offenheiser. "Once the world recovers from the global recession, commodity prices will skyrocket again, increasing the ranks of those who go hungry on a daily basis. This legislation begins the process of forging an effective strategy for fighting hunger and poverty."
Food prices on international markets rose dramatically last year and have eased in recent few months, but prices in most developing countries have remained high or continue to increase. For example, five million people are acutely affected by rising food prices in Afghanistan. The cost of cereal in Ethiopia remains drastically higher than at this time last year, and in Zimbabwe, five million people, almost half the country's population, are dependent on food aid.
The Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act would create a new food security emergency fund for rapid response during crises. The bill also delivers on new investments and partnerships in research and development in agriculture. Perhaps most important, the bill begins to address the lack of clear mission, strategy and coordination among US agencies that has hampered our efforts of fighting poverty and hunger.
"With billions injected into the financial sector over the past few months, the donor community is drawing on empty pockets, but we must see investing in agriculture as part of the long-term solution to food, financial and climate crises," said Offenheiser. "Congress should urgently pass this bill to help us prepare to deal with another major spike in food prices, as well investing in long-term efforts to fight poverty."
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