The World Food Programme (WFP) has a unique network for analyzing food security and works closely with national governments, UN partners, and NGOs. Before intervening, WFP first prioritiz es understanding the food security situation of the population of a country. WFP’s food security analysis is commonly known as VAM (vulnerability analysis and mapping) and is run by over 150 analysts around the world. They perform a wide range of assessments to identify hungry and food-insecure populations. The WFP answers the following questions:
To collect, manage, and analyze data, they use advanced technologies such as satellite imagery, geographic information systems (GIS), and mobile data collection platforms such as smartphones, tablets, and personal digital assistants. Food security analysis is a core function of WFP. For continuous monitoring of food securi ty conditions and market prices, WFP is increasingly working with its partners to establish food security monitoring systems (FSMS). Bulletins, reports, and analyses generated from all of these activities are public and can be downloaded from the Food Security Analysis Assessment Bank.
I truly appreciate the work done by WFP in such a well-planned manner. I remember back in 1994, I was leading a humanitarian mission to Croatia to give assistance to more than 25,000 Muslim refugees at the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the ethnic cleansing war against Bosnian Muslims declared by the nationalist leader of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic, who was pushing for what he called a Greater Serbia. During those tough times, I had the chance to work closely with WFP, and I saw how systematically they work and learnt a lot from them. Big thank you, WFP. Keep up the good work.
I have never heard of or seen a humanitarian crisis like the one happening in Syria now. This is year 2017, it has been more than six years, and the whole world still cannot find a solution. It is certainly a meltdown of humanity. The WFP is struggling to meet the urgent food needs of more than 5 million displaced people in Syria and its neighboring countries. How shameful!
The UAE has established a food bank to reduce food waste and feed the needy people in the region and abroad. HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, vice president of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, launched this initiative as part of the recent efforts announced by the UAE president, His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that 2017 is the Year of Giving, “which aims to instill benevolence in the hearts of our people.”
HH appointed his wife, Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum bin Juma Al Maktoum, as chair of the Board of Trustees of the UAE Food Bank. He said, “Having Sheikha Hind at the helm of the UAE Food Bank will ensure our high expectations from this new humanitarian agency . . . Sheikha Hind is very close to the people. Her love for charity qualifies her as the best person to lead the new project because we directed the bank to engage as many community agencies and volunteers as possible.”
Food security has been chosen as the first initiative this year because it is a basic human need. “We seek to engage numerous social organizations and volunteers in a system of giving, following Sheikh Zayed’s example of altruism,” HH Sheikh Mohammed said in reference to the UAE’s founding president. He added, “We hope the spirit of generosity spreads in and beyond the UAE through ambitious humanitarian initiatives throughout the Year of Giving.”
The food bank will work with authorities and charities to collect excess foods from hotels, supermarkets, restaurants, and farms. It will store and package the foods for distribution. Dubai Municipality will provide operational support in line with international food safety guidelines. Volunteers will receive health and safety training. Inedible foods will be recycled for use as fertilisers, chemicals, and medicinal research.
According to the Dubai Media Office, the UAE loses $3.5 billion in food waste every year. It said that the food bank also aims to help Dubai become the first in the region to achieve zero food waste. Last year, experts at the World Summit on Food Security said that more efforts are needed to reduce food waste in the UAE and identified it as a global problem.
A seed bank stores seeds to preserve genetic diversity; hence, it is a type of gene bank. There are many reasons for storing seeds, one of which is to have on-hand the genes that plant breeders need to increase yield, disease resistance, drought tolerance, nutritional quality, and the like of plants used in agriculture (i.e., crops or domesticated species). Another reason is to forestall loss of genetic diversity in rare or imperiled plant species by conserving biodiversity ex situ. Many plants that were used centuries ago by humans are used less frequently now, and seed banks offer a way to preserve that historical and cultural value.
The Global Seed Vault is situated in Svalbard, midway between Norway and the Arctic, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, near Longyearbyen, in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole. Conservationist Cary Fowler, in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) started the vault to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds that are duplicate samples, or “spare” copies, of seeds held in banks worldwide. The Norwegian government wholly funded the vault’s approximately US$9 million construction. Storing seeds in the vault is free for end users, with Norway and the Global Crop Diversity Trust paying for the operational costs. The Trust’s primary funding comes from organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and various governments worldwide.
I am proud to say that Sharjah has also taken an initiative to preserve seeds. The Sharjah Seed Bank, founded in 2009, aims to preserve the genetic origins of terrestrial plants through seed genes. In 2014, the bank secured grants worth $1.3 million to work on projects that involve conserving desert habitats and to research the use of native plants for commercial purposes. The funding is provided by the government of Sharjah, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Emirates Foundation, and the Qatar Foundation.
The bank has modern facilities and laboratories to preserve the environmental heritage of seeds and herbs in the UAE. Botanists at the bank said that since 2012, they have collected 5,000 plant samples from across the Emirates, of which around 3,000 were classified and indexed into 415 species.
A major contributor to crop loss is plant disease. While many farmers are able to identify some of the plant diseases, they lack access to proper treatment to save their crops on time. In 2015, PEAT, or Progressive Environmental and Agricultural Technologies, established a German start-up, which has developed a mobile app called Plantix.
It has a massive database of pictures of plant diseases, which are used for comparison and help in the identification and subsequent diagnosis and treatment. PEAT aims to support farmers across the world, specifically in developing countries, in using technology to enhance their agricultural output through timely and informed disease treatment.
In India, the life of a farmer is never easy. If the pests do not get you, the bad monsoons will; and if the monsoons do not come, then the moneylenders will. And on top of it all, chemicals can render the farm useless, or the middlemen can fleece you by not paying a fair price for the product. The bottom line is that there are just too many negative elements at play.
According to the World Bank, India has 395 million acres of land available for cultivation, of which only 215 million acres are cultivated. The founders of PEAT want to save farming in India. Over the last couple of years, PEAT has been working with 30,000 Indian farmers. Today, agriculture is a $500 billion industry, and there are more than 30 Indian start-ups that use technology to solve problems in the industry. VDrone, Kisan Network, and Crofarm are some of the start-ups that use drones and supply chain technologies and farm aggregation (farm-to-fork connect) to make farming a productive enterprise. I appreciate their efforts in helping farmers, as agriculture is demographically the broadest economic sector and plays a significant role in the overall socioeconomic fabric of India and many other countries.
Currently, Kenya is going through a food crisis that has led farmers to believe that the importation of maize to stabilize the rising prices of flour is a government scheme to flood the local market with cheap produce. Maize production in Rift Valley, the country’s food basket, reduced from 21 million to 16 million bags last season because of various factors ranging from erratic rainfall to disease outbreak.
The farmers asked the government to implement agricultural policies that could help and motivate them to increase their crop production to end the recurrent food crisis. Mr. Andrew Rotich, chairman of the Trans Nzoia Maize and Livestock Association, said, “Dependence on maize imports to curb the current food shortage is a clear indicator that the government is not concerned about the welfare of the farmers.”
The farmers have attributed this maize shortage to decreased acreage used for the cultivation of the crop owing to increased costs of farm inputs and an unstable market for the produce.
“Apart from erratic rainfall, disease outbreak, and other factors such as substandard farm inputs, augmented production costs have discouraged most farmers from investing in cereal farming, which has contributed to the current maize shortage,” said Mr. Jackson Kosgey, a farmer from Moiben, Uasin Gishu County.
I want to give special thanks to the British International School in Ajman for encouraging the new generation to plant, and for letting them know the importance of green world. On March 9, the school celebrated its first Harvest Festival of 2017, where students plucked 13 kilograms of organic vegetables from the school’s greenhouse.
The harvest festival offered the students an opportunity to make cross-curricular learning possible with art, science, environmental studies, and maths, all involved in what proved to be a hands-on learning process. Grades 5 and 6 students collected the best tomatoes and cabbages grown on the campus and set up a stall to sell the harvest.
On this wonderful initiative, the school principal, Dr. Tariq, said, “The harvest festival has not only energized the spirit of students but also uplifted the feeling of accomplishment from their own labor when the harvested vegetables were sold to parents and teachers.”
According to FoodCloud, Ireland’s not-for-profit organization that matches surplus foods in shops and restaurants with charity organizations and then gives them out to the community, “If 50,000 people in Ireland reduce food waste by just 1 kilogram per week, just over $1 million will be saved. That’s equivalent to over 5.7 million meals.” And at least 1 million tonnes of food in Ireland and almost 1.3 billion tonnes worldwide are wasted per year. To put that into context, one in every four calories produced from food in the world is wasted. FoodCloud brings together policy-makers, chefs, retailers, and foodies to discuss how they can tackle the food waste challenge and identify opportunities.
To address this issue, government bodies, such as the Monaghan County Council and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, which take all the reasonable steps to ensure that food consumed, produced, distributed, or marketed in the state meets the highest standards of food safety, have made a wonderful video with the slogan “Food Waste = Money Waste.”
Yes, food waste is a serious issue and should be tackled properly. I am glad to see that both the private and the government sector in Ireland are actively taking good initiatives to address this issue and setting a good example for other governments.
The Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology (ESMA), which works to provide consumer protection, address environmental concerns, monitor the national market, and strengthen the national economy, by preparing standard specifications for review by specialized technical committees, has warned of the recent spread of unsupported/noncertified devices that produce non-real results and “misleading” measurements of the ratio of chemicals in some fruits and vegetables in the state markets using the so-called green test, which is being promoted in the social media. On May 25, 2017, directives from the emirates authorized coordination among economic development departments and municipalities so they would work together to pull these products out of the state market.
The director general of the ESMA, Abdullah al-Maeeni, stated that there was no scientific basis or origin of the results, ratios, and indicators resulting from this type of device. He further explained that the examination of the proportions of chemicals in products should be conducted through devices that are subject to laboratory testing and periodic calibration to confirm their readiness to inspect the chemicals and the accuracy of their measurements, which has never occurred in the case of the said device. Maeeni emphasized that the device gave false information, was not registered with competent local authorities, and should be registered with the relevant authorities before it could be sold and promoted to ascertain its purpose and accuracy in calibration and metering, especially since this type of appliance was not subjected to a certified calibration.
