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A coalition of more than 60 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has today published a joint declaration, calling on all states and financial institutions to end the practice of land grabbing. The declaration was timed to coincide with the annual Agriculture Investment Summit, being held in London between 26th-29th June 2012. During the event, financial investors and pension funds gather to explore investment opportunities in agriculture across the globe. The NGO declaration highlights deep concerns surrounding the soaring number of pension funds, acquiring large stretches of farmland in developing countries, a practice that threatens the livelihoods and food sovereignty of local communities. Highlighting the coalition’s deep concerns, Rachel Tansey of Friends of the Earth Europe said “European pension funds are driving land grabs across the globe, with serious social and environmental impacts. Anyone with a pension could be implicated in human rights violations and ecological destruction. In a world where 1 billion people already go hungry, land must stay in the hands of local communities so that they can feed themselves”. Research indicates that millions of hectares of land have been leased or bought up in recent years, mainly to produce food or fuel for an international market, seriously damaging the livelihoods of the local population who have relied on these same lands to survive for generations. The declaration calls on states to ensure that pension funds stop speculation on land and damaging investments in global food chains.The signatories have demanded the disclosure of information about direct or indirect financing of land acquisitions and other deals that might involve land grabbing, and have called for a mandatory, prior and independent impact assessment of these investments.

The government of the second most populous state in India, Maharashtra, is rethinking its policy of promoting Bt cotton. Officials have announced a pilot project, designed to increase yields of cotton while reducing cultivation costs, by implementing a ‘Brazilian’ model which uses straight varieties of cotton and not hybrid or Bt (genetically-modified) ones. Questions have recently been asked about the suitability of Bt Cotton in Maharashtra. According to official statistics, in 2012, nearly 12.1 million hectares of land was under cotton cultivation in India, of which around 90% is Bt cotton. However, state agriculture commissioner Umakant Dangat said, “India has the lowest cotton productivity in the world and Maharashtra, the lowest in India. A recently released study by the Council of Social Development (CSD) called ‘Socio-economic impact assessment of Bt cotton in India’, raises similar concerns around yield. The CSD study questions whether the marginal land of the eastern region of Maharashtra is suited for Bt cotton at all. CCIR director Keshav Kranthi, optimistic about the new pilot project, said. “We can even match the world average if our experiment becomes successful,” adding that the Brazil pattern not only increases the yield per hectares, but also reduces the cultivation cost by almost two-thirds compared to Bt cotton. He explained that the cost of seeds of straight varieties is much lower than Bt varieties, and that these varieties become ready for plucking in 150-160 days whereas BT varieties take about 180-200 days, substantially reducing the need for fertilizers, pesticides and other nutrients. And unlike Bt cotton varieties, seeds derived from straight cotton varieties can be used during the next season also, he said, adding: “All these factors reduce the cost of cultivation from around Rs. 12,500 per ha. to under Rs. 5,000 per ha.”

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a new report yesterday, warning that the ecological foundations supporting food security are under threat. The UNEP report ‘Avoiding Future Famines’ was written by 12 leading experts involved in world food systems. The authors found that agriculture is facing multiple threats, including competition for water, deforestation and conventional agricultural practices. The report went on to illustrate how these threats are being exacerbated by population growth and the changing of lifestyles and diets. “The era of seemingly ever-lasting production based upon maximizing inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanisation are hitting their limits,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. The report also highlights the importance of ecosystems and the environmental aspects of food security, and is critical that past debates were mainly restricted to factors such as the availability of food and access to it. The authors issued recommendations on how to protect these ecological foundations and improve food security, which include: designing sustainable agriculture on a larger scale, improving soil management, securing efficient agricultural water use, supporting farmers and promoting sustainable diets with less meat consumption in developed countries.

International NGOs and United Nation’s food agencies have called on G20 leaders to put food security high on their agenda at the G20 summit in Mexico. Oxfam’s spokesperson Steve Price-Thomas said “The G20 is failing to address the most important drivers of the food price crisis: increased demand for biofuels, financial speculation on commodities, and climate change”. Oxfam activists went on to present, at an imitation G20 leaders ‘working lunch’, a to-do list in which poverty reduction and food security ranked highly. However, worries about economic crises in European countries are overshadowing other important issues on the agenda. Neil Watkins from ActionAid USA said the conference should focus on all economies, not only the largest ones. He also drew attention to the biofuel policies of G20 nations as one of the root causes of the hunger crisis, highlighting a recently published ActionAid report which illustrated how increases in US corn production for biofuels had the knock on effect of triggering a rise in food import prices in Mexico. Today, three key UN food agencies, FAO, IFAD and the WFP, joined with the NGOs to demand that the G20 redouble their efforts to fight hunger, issuing a statement with 17 recommendations.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned on Thursday that both agricultural production methods and food systems must move away from fossil fuel dependence towards renewable energy sources. The FAO report on ‘energy-smart food’ released ahead of the Rio+20 conference, also made clear that to improve food security and achieve sustainability it is important to both increase food energy efficiency and cut food losses. The FAO highlighted the fact that global food production from farm to fork accounts for 30% of total energy use, with more than 70% of this consumed ‘beyond the farm gate’ during transport, processing, packaging and marketing. As one third of the food produced globally is lost or wasted - 1.3 billion tons per year - almost 40% of the energy used in the food chain is wasted as well. To tackle this problem, the FAO are calling on companies and organisations to join SAVE FOOD, an initiative set up by UN agencies and the private sector to reduce food losses and waste.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has been appointed a Special Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations for his work promoting the quinoa plant as an important way to alleviate hunger. The ceremony, held yesterday in Rome, heralds the UN’s International Year of the Quinoa 2013. Morales not only praised the nutritional value of quinoa, which he argued is rich in protein, micronutrients and unsaturated fats, but also its value as a crop. The quinoa plant is unusual in that it has been preserved in its natural form due to traditional knowledge and practices of the indigenous Andean people. “Quinoa has been cultivated for more than 7,000 years and is presented as a worthy alternative amid the current food crisis. It can achieve good yields and is very resistant to frost,” said Morales, a former small-scale quinoa farmer. Given quinoa’s ability to adapt to areas with relative humidity of up to 88 per cent as well as extreme altitudes, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva supported this position, stressing the role quinoa can play for food insecure countries in the face climate change.

Global food prices dropped in May according to the Food Price Index published Thursday by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The index measures price changes in a food basket consisting of commodities such as cereals, dairy products and oilseeds. Food prices averaged 204 points in May, a drop of 9 per cent compared to April. This was the lowest level since September 2010, when prices started to rocket reaching a peak in February 2011 at 238 points. The FAO attributes this drop to a favourable outlook in many producing countries, the strong US dollar and global fears about the European debt crisis. The FAO also predicted world cereal production would reach a new record in 2012 of 2,419 million tonnes, an increase of 3.2 per cent from last year. This increase is attributed mainly to improved forecasts for US maize production and would result in production levels exceeding the expected cereal utilization of 2,376 million tonnes, permitting stocks to be replenished. However, FAO’s grain analyst Abdolreza Abbassian said it is still too early to give the all-clear. "Crop prices have come down sharply from their peak level but they remain still high and vulnerable due to risks related to weather conditions in the critical growing months ahead."

According to a briefing paper published by APRODEV and PELUM Association, the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) has largely failed to take the IAASTD’s findings into account within its agricultural research policy. This briefing paper, which analysed the extent to which agricultural research, one of the four CAADP pillars, meets the needs of small-scale farmers, names five key problems. It noted that African states have not kept their promise to double spending on agricultural research and that, while the IAASTD had stressed the need to close the gender gap in agricultural policies, vital measures to support female farmers were still missing. With women being the main food producers in Africa this is an issue that urgently needs to be addressed. Furthermore, the CAADP continues to be based on a farming model that relies heavily on external inputs, such as fertilisers and pesticides and seeds from agribusiness, rather than promoting sustainable farming systems. In addition, in contrast to the IAASTD, which is cautious on GM crops and underlines the importance of local, informal seed systems, CAADP partners still continue to promote GM crops and more formal seed legislation. The paper concludes that CAADP programmes often disregard the needs of smallholders because they have only a small voice in the design of the agricultural research agenda.

On Friday, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff vetoed selected sections of a controversial new Forest Code, that had recently been introduced to alter regulations relating to the preservation of forests. Rousseff had faced growing pressure from across the world to veto the entire bill after Congress passed a version in late April that critics argued substantially weakened the protection of forests and the penalties for illegal forest clearings. Rousseff vetoed 12 articles in total and introduced 32 modifications to the bill, which if left in, would have undermined reforestation requirements and the protection of riverbanks. However, conservationists were disappointed that the President did not simply reject the entire bill in response to concerns that the new ‘Codigo Florestal’ would increase deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. “Dilma has ignored the 80 percent of Brazilians who opposed the changes to the current Forest Code and demanded a full veto”, said Greenpeace Brazil's Paulo Adario. The bill will now be sent back to Congress, which can, in a month, override Rousseff’s veto with a simple majority. Some analysts point out that this stratergy will give Dilma Rousseff the time she needs to present herself as protector of forests at the upcoming Rio+20 conference in June.

At the G8 summit in Camp David, U.S. President Obama announced a ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ which aims to help 50 million Africans escape poverty and hunger within 10 years through an increase in agricultural growth. The plan is for the programme to start in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana and then expand to other African countries. However, the backbone of the initiative is made up of $3 billion of private sector investment, across the entire agricultural chain of production. In total 45 multinational companies plan to invest, most of which are based outside Africa, including agribusiness giants Monsanto, Cargill and DuPont. Swiss agrochemical company Syngenta is to invest over $500 million to develop seeds for local farmers. Several NGOs welcomed the commitment to fight hunger but were sceptical about dependence on the private sector: “Smallholder farmers need the freedom to pursue their own growing strategies, not take overly-prescriptive tips on farming from G8 leaders, or one size fits all technologies from far away CEOs”, said Lamine Ndiaye from Oxfam. The new alliance builds on pledges made at L’Aquila in 2009, where G8 nations committed $22 billion to food security and agricultural investment over three years - only part of the money has been disbursed.