Food prices won''t drop in 2012 says FAO Chief by Reuters, NYT & agencies 12:41pm 1st Jan, 2012   Jan 2012 (Reuters Alertnet)    New FAO chief says food prices won''t drop in 2012. Says volatility at high levels to persist. More people expected to go hungry in 2012.    Prices of some foods may ease slightly in 2012 due to a slowing global economy but are unlikely to drop from the high levels reached last year, the new director-general of the U.N.''s Food and Agriculture Organisation says.    Jose Graziano da Silva, the Brazilian who replaced Senegal''s Jacques Diouf at the helm of the FAO at the start of 2012, said volatility in food markets was likely to continue and that more people would be at risk of hunger due to economic instability.    "Prices will not be going up as in the last two to three years but will also not drop down. There may be some reductions but not so drastic, in the short term," Graziano da Silva told a news conference in Rome. "Volatility will remain, that is clear," he said.    Global food prices measured by the FAO hit a peak last February but have been falling since June as crops have improved and concerns about global economic turmoil have reined in demand growth.    High food prices have helped fuel inflation and contributed to the civil unrest which created the Arab Spring last year.    Graziano da Silva said he did not expect the economic slowdown in Europe to impact funding for FAO projects, because the amount countries donated was such a small proportion of gross domestic product that they were unlikely to cut it.    But he said the slowdown was likely to increase the number of people at risk of hunger in the world, which is estimated at over one billion people.    "We will have more work to do, with more people hungry, more people unemployed, and we will need new ways to assist them," he said, as he began a term of three and a half years.    The 62-year-old agronomist, who is the first Latin American at the helm of the U.N. agency, said he would focus efforts on poor countries that are most in need of outside help and that his priority would be Africa. He plans a visit to the Horn of Africa early this year, where drought and famine are affecting millions of people.    The FAO is the largest U.N. agency with an annual budget of some $1 billion and 3,600 workers. It is fighting food crises across the world that have been aggravated by price volatility.    Graziano da Silva, the former head of the FAO in Latin America and the Caribbean and a former minister for food security in Brazil, will work to bridge differences between donor countries and developing countries to foster consensus.    Jan 2012    For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow, by Adam Nossiter. (NYT)    Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo — Today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Bénédicte, Josiane and Manassé, 3, 6, and 9.    Of course, the small ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any,” said their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month. There will have been a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more. “At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”    The Berboks are practicing a Kinshasa family ritual almost as common here as corrugated metal roofs and dirt streets: the “power cut,” as residents in this capital of some 10 million have ironically christened it. On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days, all the children eat, and the adults do not. Or vice versa.    The term “power cut” — in French, délestage — is meant to evoke another unloved routine of city life: the rolling blackouts that hit first one neighborhood, then another.    Délestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe these state-decreed power cutoffs, but when applied to rationing food it illustrates a stark survival calculus, one the head of a household must painfully impose on the rest. And unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness mandated from on high.    “If today we eat, tomorrow we’ll drink tea,” said Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month; the numbers, Mr. Nsala pointed out, simply do not add up. Are there days when his children do not eat? “Of course!” Mr. Nsala answered, puzzled at the question. “It can be two days a week,” he said.    Though residents here frequently gather on crowded street corners to argue politics, their daily struggle may help explain why the capital did not experience sustained mass demonstrations after disputed election results were announced last month. Sporadic protests and street clashes certainly erupted, but the margin of survival here is simply too slim for most people to demonstrate for very long.    “People in Kinshasa are so poor, they are living hand to mouth,” said Théodore Trefon, a researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. “They simply don’t have the means to mobilize for a long time.”    Whatever the city’s misgivings about the vote, daily life itself is enough of a challenge.    “On the weekend, you’ve got to do everything you can to have food because you are at home with the children,” said Mr. Nsala, the administrator. “But there are days, for sure, when we don’t eat. I’ll say, ‘There isn’t enough to eat, so you, maman and the kids, you take it.’ ”    Mr. Nsala, soft-spoken stared at the floor of his modest cinder-block, metal-roofed living room. His wife was selling vegetables out front, to supplement the meager family income. Don’t ask him about meat. “Maybe, if we make a sacrifice,” he said, pointing out that a pound of beef costs $5.    At the Berbok household — where Ghislaine’s husband, a teacher, earns $42 a month, adding to her salary as a police officer — there has been no fish in a year.    “Délestage. That means: ‘Today we eat. Tomorrow we don’t.’ The Congolese, in the spirit of irony, have adopted this term,” said Mr. Nsala quietly. He added that the family had eaten the day before: “So, today, there is nothing.”    The food délestage is not new in Congo, a country rich in minerals and verdant landscapes yet also one of the hungriest on earth, according to experts. It is last on the 2011 Global Hunger Index, a measure of malnutrition and child nutrition compiled by the International Food Policy Research Institute, and has gotten worse. It was the only country where the food situation dropped from “alarming” to “extremely alarming,” the institute reported this year. Half the country is considered undernourished.    Ten years ago, even poor Congolese could expect to eat one substantial meal a day — perhaps cassava, a starchy root, with some palm oil, and a little of the imported frozen fish that is a staple here. But in the last three years, even that certainty has dropped away, said Dr. Eric Tollens, an expert on nutrition in Congo at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he is an emeritus professor at the Center for Agricultural and Food Economics.    Dr. Tollens blamed the “total neglect of agriculture by the government,” which is fixated on the lucrative extraction of valuable minerals like copper and cobalt. Less than 1 percent of the Congolese national budget, he said, goes to agriculture.    “Massive amounts of food” are imported, so food is expensive. Agricultural productivity is simply gone,” he said. Half the population eats only once a day, Dr. Tollens wrote in an essay several years ago, while a quarter eats only once every two days.    “Before, we ate three times a day; now, we eat by délestage,” said Cele Bunata-Kumba, a sports coach who lives in the Matongele neighborhood of Kinshasa with his wife and children.    “Today, it’s the children who eat,” he said. “We, the adults, we can sacrifice ourselves. We, the adults, we can get by,” he said, grimacing. “Yes, yes, of course, all day. With nothing to eat. No bread. Sure, that happens,” he added.    In the household run by Elisa Luzingu and her sister-in-law Marie Bumba —the children range in age from 7 to 17. Délestage means no meals, three days a week. On the days without food, Ms. Bumba said, the children “will be very tired and hungry.” Visit the related web page
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