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	The world’s food crisis: time to move by Simon Maxwell WFP / Overseas Development Institute   September 2011   The world is in the middle of a food crisis. But both the economic understanding and the political impetus are less than they were in 2008.   The famine in east Africa dominates the headlines, and rightly so. After all famine, wherever it occurs, is a charge on the global conscience.   In global terms, food prices remain very close to levels last seen in 2007-08 - when the food crisis was centre-stage, until it was displaced by the financial meltdown of August 2008.   The World Bank’s food-price index of August 2011 remained 33% above the level of a year previously, and only 10% below the 2008 peak. Similarly, the FAO price index shows that prices are more than twice the level reached before the 2007-08 spike - itself justifying the FAO’s “initiative on soaring food prices”.   Moreover, high global prices are mirrored at country level: unevenly, but in some cases with startling clarity. In countries as widely dispersed as Uganda, the Dominican Republic and Kyrgystan, staple prices have doubled in 2010-11. Elsewhere, they have gone up by a half or more.   There are two problems - which can be highlighted by reference to what was happening in 2007-08.   First, estimates of the impact of the crisis seem less visible and more muted than last time (when, for example, the World Bank warned that the crisis would drive 100 million people below the poverty-line, and reverse seven years’ worth of gains in poverty-reduction).   Second, there is less political urgency. This time, the G20’s agriculture ministers seem to be in the lead. That is a worry, insofar as a basic truth of food crises is that their implications go well beyond agriculture.   After the world food crisis of 1972-74, the United Nations set up a World Food Council to try to prevent future crises; but it had foundered by 1993, partly because it was owned by agriculture ministers who lacked the remit to tackle such a comprehensive issue.   The explanation for the difference in the level of attention in 2008 and 2011, is perhaps the west’s financial crises. Yet food-security issues should remain a priority: feeding a growing population; tackling malnutrition; preventing famine; adjusting to water scarcity; and both preventing and dealing with the consequences of climate change.   If these are to be tackled in a systematic way, both the macroeconomics and the politics of the food crisis need to be improved.   Again, the macroeconomics, including the fiscal cost of social protection, have dropped off the agenda in an alarming way.   The political reality too is problematic at a time of uncertainty and price spikes. Rising food prices helped to trigger the unrest in Egypt that overthrew Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.   In Egypt and elsewhere, the connection between domestic food policy and the threat of social unrest is obvious.   If such issues are to be addressed, then governments in the global south need international guarantees that resources and sufficient support - such as large-scale, immediate and effective mechanisms - will be available to help them manage the consequences of food-price spikes. A big responsibility here devolves on G20 leaders, to think anew about the food crisis of 2011.   That means recognising its importance; acknowledging the economic and political risks; supporting investments in agriculture, improvements in transparency, and guarantees of locally managed stocks; moving on speculation and especially biofuels; and then facing the need for much larger and more reliable shock mechanisms. All this would be good economics and good politics. The millions made vulnerable by food-price fluctuations around the world deserve no less.   * Simon Maxwell is a senior research associate of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). He is executive chair of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network. Visit the related web page
	Linking school feeding programs with local agricultural production by World Food Programme & agencies   Home Grown School Feeding: a Framework to Link School Feeding with Local Agricultural Production.   In the broadest sense, home-grown school feeding (HGSF) is a school feeding programme that provides food produced and purchased within a country to the extent possible.   The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and other partners to develop an approach to HGSF.   This document is a culmination of these efforts. It focuses in particular on linking school feeding programmes with local small-scale farmer production by creating an ongoing market for small landholders (“smallholders”).   More in-depth case studies are also available for Home-Grown School Feeding Programmes in four countries (Brazil, Ghana, India and Thailand). Visit the related web page
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