Rome, Italy
June 13, 2008
Trucks loaded with more than 500
tonnes of seed left the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott today for
six regional capitals, marking the beginning of
FAO-supported emergency
measures in the country forming part of the Organization’s
Initiative on Soaring Food Prices.
About 20 trucks full of sorghum, millet, maize and cowpea seeds,
are now on their way to the country’s south and south east,
while parallel distribution in other regions will be managed by
the Mauritanian government. Most of the crops will need to be
planted immediately in order to coincide with the rainy season
which normally arrives in June.
“Due to dry spells and then floods last year, what farmers would
have produced was largely wiped out in the flood-affected
areas,” said Luca Fornasari, the FAO emergency coordinator in
Mauritania. “In addition, imported food is skyrocketing and
farmers had to sell their seed stocks to be able to buy food, or
had to use them as food.” he said. “Seed delivery will help
farmers get back on their feet now.”
In December, prices of millet were 50 percent higher than a year
before, sorghum had doubled, and maize was up 60 percent. Prices
have continued to increase steadily since then. Imported wheat
and rice have seen even sharper increases, pricing out large
swaths of the country’s poorest people.
People are coping in alarming ways, by eating less or eating one
meal per day. Others are selling their livestock but cannot even
get a decent price for skinny animals in the lean season.
Already high levels of malnutrition are on the rise.
Currently, in a best case scenario, Mauritania does not even
produce enough food to meet 30 percent of its food needs. The
government aims to double agricultural output to cover 60
percent of its food needs with the next harvests. Agriculture is
still the source of income for over 70 percent of the country’s
poorest people.
It will take much more than just seeds
Mauritania is a vast desert country, and agriculture depends on
exploiting the just 0.5 percent of land that is arable for food
production. The best opportunity to boost agricultural output on
a more permanent basis, said the FAO Representative in
Mauritania, Radisav Pavlovic, is to rehabilitate and expand
irrigation systems.
“We need to consider that out of the 500 000 hectares (ha) that
can be used for agriculture, just 140 000 ha is irrigable land,
in the valley of the Senegal River. Of that, only 45 000 ha are
in some way already equipped for irrigation,” he said. “But due
to the decaying infrastructure and canals not being maintained,
only some 15 000 ha – about 11 percent – are in fact irrigated,”
Pavlovic added.
Investors are taking interest
“In the short-term, self-sufficiency might be unrealistic, but
an increase of 50 to 60 percent in local production can quite
possibly be achieved,” said FAO economist Jacques Strebelle. The
seeds being supplied today are just the immediate emergency
response.
“For private Mauritanian investors, for example, for many years
it was not profitable to invest in agriculture. Now that
agriculture is profitable, investors will take interest,” he
said.
This has created new opportunities to invest in rice farming in
the Senegal River Valley, for example. In other regions that are
dependent on rain-fed agriculture, water storage can be vastly
improved through investments in dams, dykes and water pumps to
feed agriculture, Strebelle said. In addition, the rain-fed
areas can be leveraged for seed development and storage
activities to help boost the seed supply and diversify
production activities.
The FAO Initiative on Soaring Food Prices is also active in
Senegal, Burkina Faso and Haiti this season, and activities will
begin in Timor-Leste and Mozambique in the coming weeks. FAO is
currently providing the funding for the Initiative on Soaring
Food Prices, drawing US$17 million from its own resources to
kickstart activities in the countries most affected by the
crisis while planting is still possible.
More than 70 countries are seeking FAO assistance in the
upcoming planting seasons in October/November as well as for
next spring. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf has said that
$US1.7 billion will be needed to fully support the Initiative on
Soaring Food Prices. |
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