By Clarens Renois
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BALAN, Haiti (AFP) -- More than 250 students have gathered in the two rooms of a small public school here, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the country's capital Port-au-Prince, waiting for a meal prepared by the World Food Program. Across this impoverished Caribbean island nation, more than half a million young Haitians rely on the school meals provided by the organization, often the only food they will eat all day.
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Haitian women wait with their children at a health and food distribution event from the United Nations World Food Program, Programme Alimentaire Mondial (PAM) in Balan a suburb of Ganthier. AFP PHOTO "In the year since this cafeteria was established in this public building in Balan, the number of students using it has grown each month," said director Sauveur Noel, 66. "In November we had numerous requests to register students. People know that since last year we have been feeding the children. So...," the director said with a smile, seated behind an old table in a room built of tin and planks.
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Noel himself attended the school "a long time ago," and acknowledges that "today I should be in retirement but I've returned to serve my community and accompany the children of my village," he says.
A year ago, he appealed to the World Food Program (WFP) to bring assistance to the school, which had been all but forgotten by the government and abandoned by the community. "When we arrived here, we realized immediately that it was important to help the school, but we insisted on a minimum standard of hygiene. We had a toilet and a kitchen built," said Nancy Exilas, a Haitian WFP official.
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"Since we added the school to the program, activities have been restarted and the children have become more efficient," she added. In hundreds of public schools and assemblies across Haiti, the WFP provides food rations for the youngest living in areas with significant food insecurity, like Balan.
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When the food is ready, it is served in classrooms to the waiting youngsters, who happily dig into their portions of rice and beans with a sardine sauce. In the courtyard, their parents get a portion of their own. "I can assure you this here is where we eat, the WFP is our God here in Balan," said one woman, whose two children attend the school. In the 1,400 schools where the WFP provides the crucial meals, food stocks could run out within weeks, leaving 530,000 students without meals in Haiti's primary schools.
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The prospect has forced the organization to seek 13 million dollars (nine million euros) in funding to continue the program. Parents and teachers agree that if the program were to stop, the results would be "catastrophic." After the meal is served at midday, the students at Balan school get back to work. In the school's two classrooms, students from all six classes are seated on wooden benches, some repeating mathematical formulas while others learn literart extracts written out on an old blackboard. Today, their bellies are full.

No Shortage of Blame as Haiti Struggles to Feed Itself -By NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire
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GRANMONT, Haiti -- With its rich delta soil and a year-round growing season, Haiti's famous agricultural region seems capable of feeding the entire Caribbean. But Haiti is a net importer of food, spending about $400 million last year
on purchases from abroad. The World Food Programme runs child nutrition and "food for work" operations. And fields in the nation's breadbasket, Artibonite Department, have been periodically swamped by flash floods and mud washed by tropical downpours off barren hillsides.
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Farmers in the Granmont agricultural area, just outside Gonaïves, the department capital, say their plight is being ignored by the government and relief agencies focusing on defending urban infrastructure from flooding and strong storms. "Granmont is the only place now in Gonaïves where you can produce all the food for the town," said Wilson Adeclair, a leader of a local community organization. "This place needs to be protected."
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Though Gonaïves -- which was slammed by three devastating hurricanes and a tropical storm last year -- is the focus of extensive engineering aimed at curbing catastrophic flooding, Adeclair and his group have insisted that available aid money also be used to protect Granmont and other farming areas. They got their wish: 200 men and women are now digging a 4-foot-deep trench between the city and farmland aimed at draining floodwaters and protecting crops. Workers here voice frustration at what they see as a lack of focus by the
government and U.N. officials on their region, which produces rice, potatoes, tomatoes, leafy greens, bananas, cassava, peas, corn, cereals, papayas and mangoes.
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Phase one of the canal is nearly complete, and the workers say they are confident it will get the job done. But they fear storm infrastructure in
the city could send more water to farming areas than they can handle. They are also worried they won't have enough money to take the channel all the
way to the sea. "We are the only ones who are fighting every time to make a kind of presentation about the importance of this place, and sometimes it's very, very difficult for us," Adeclair said.
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Haiti was the scene of food riots last year as commodity prices rose to record highs and the cost of imports soared. Experts say the riots were a consequence of the misguided policies of aid
agencies, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which have for decades been telling Haiti to focus on exporting textiles and using the cash to purchase cheap food from the United States. "Whenever they'd go to the World Bank and say, 'We need agriculture development spending,' they would say, 'No, that's not what we're doing,'"
said Roger Thurow, co-author of the new book "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty."
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"It was under the whole Washington consensus 'food is cheap' policy that the word basically went out to Haiti," Thurow said in a recent interview. "So
what happens in 2008? Prices of rice increase ... all of a sudden they can buy half as much rice, there's shortages in the country, the prices go up
more, hunger follows, there's the riots, government falls." The 2008 storm season, when a tropical storm and three hurricanes slammed into the country over a period of four weeks, created a full-blown crisis as
flooding and mudslides devastated crops. Hunger got so bad in some places that the poorest of the capital's slums literally resorted to eating dirt,
in the form of baked clay "cookies."
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In the aftermath of the storms, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development organized a $10
million emergency distribution of seeds and plants to get farmers back to work as soon as possible.
After two harvests, the effort has yielded impressive results, FAO said, but that program is scheduled to end in January, and there is no word on whether it will be extended.
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At last year's annual FAO meeting, national and international aid agencies vowed they would end their decades-long neglect of food production and
prioritize building healthy agricultural industries in the developing world. But the residents of Gonaïves who depend on agriculture say they see no
evidence of that new commitment. The same promises were heard yesterday at the close of this year's FAO
conference, regarded by many private nonprofits as a failure. Attendance was poor, and governments rejected FAO's call for $44 billion in annual spending on growing food in the developing world, though trillions have been spent shoring up bank balance sheets.
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And on the ground here, people who depend on agriculture are disappointed. "We have seen nothing," said Oubens Dosselie, coordinator for an
organization focused on the economic needs of women.
In and around Gonaïves, most foreign donor attention still seems to be focused on post-storm recovery.
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Private aid groups are still clearing mud from streets and drainage canals. The U.S. Agency for International Development is financing the replacement of dozens of small bridges wiped out by the storms. The U.N. Development Programme arranged the funds for the Granmont project but only after
prodding by the locals. Many experts agree with Dosselie's bleak assessment. They see little indication that the World Bank, USAID, and Japanese and European aid agencies have shifted their priorities to helping the Third World grow
enough food to meet its needs. The World Food Programme, an agency with a long history of feeding people in Haiti, has only recently turned its
attention to helping farmers produce crops.
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"The rhetoric says it's going to shift. I don't think we've seen clear evidence that that has really started," said Colin Chartres, director of water management at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). "I think it's a long journey." The United Nations and local workers say the Haitian government has to step
up and pay more attention to food production, but the government has earmarked 6.95 percent of its 2009-2010 budget for agriculture.
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"We encourage the government to allocate no less than 12 percent of their budget," said Ari Toubo Ibrahim, FAO's chief of operations in Haiti. Haiti's agriculture and environment ministers, both facing uncertain futures as the Senate forced a fifth change of government in five years, were
unavailable to comment on the country's budget for food production. Compared to other parts of the Third World, Haiti may have better food security because of the large U.N. presence and the massive interventions of last year, Ibrahim said. The government claims that the number of "food
insecure" Haitians -- those facing starvation -- dropped from 2.4 million last year to 1.9 million.
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But experts say the country's progress could be lost unless the government devotes more resources to building the nation's agricultural industry. It
could have an opportunity to start doing that next month, when Haiti hosts a regional conference on food security for Latin American and the Caribbean.
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"I think that they should not just host the meeting," Ibrahim said, "but also present a program and spell out their objectives, and maybe make a real commitment to reach those objectives." Community groups say such a program entails more than just distributing seeds. A comprehensive system of drainage canals is needed to protect
cropland from routine flooding. Haiti's roads are in abysmal shape, leaving farmers no means to get their excess produce to markets in good years. Promises to repair roads go unfulfilled, and requests for fertilizers go unanswered.
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"Every month, we have a promise for the building of a road," said Adeclair, the community organization leader. "But it never comes."
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For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com.

The U.S. is interested in potentially using more locally-produced food aid rather than U.S. grown food as a way to expand investment in agricultural development in the developing world, said Alonzo Fulgham, acting head USAID, "on the sidelines of a World Food Summit in Rome" on Tuesday, Reuters reports. "The United States is the largest food donor in the world but Washington has been criticized by non-governmental organizations for shipping too much U.S.-grown food to hunger-stricken areas," the news service writes.
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According to Fulgham, "Our country is looking at the policy and identifying where we should be buying food locally to increase capacity. … That is all part of our new strategy and the new administration is looking very strongly at it but like all rules ... it has to be negotiated and discussed in Congress."
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When discussing the G8’s $22 billion three-year agriculture initiative, "Fulgham reiterated Washington's position that this money would best be channeled through a fund administered by the World Bank, whose head is normally appointed by the United States" (Flynn, 11/17).
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At the summit on Monday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) and the World Food Program (WFP) launched "a food-security strategy to help developing nations address food insecurity by investing in agriculture and safety nets, to address hunger exacerbated by the food and financial crises and climate change," BusinessMirror reports (Abano, 11/17).
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According to an FAO statement, "The agencies will address overlaps, find additional synergies … This builds on a portfolio of 400 activities involving collaboration in more than 70 countries. All areas of work are being addressed. In the administrative area, collaboration is aimed at achieving cost reduction, efficiency savings, streamlined business processes and knowledge sharing. Joint tendering and the piloting of a common procurement unit starting in January 2010 are a few examples" (11/16).
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Summit Fails To Deal With Large Agri-Business Market Dominance, U.N. Official Says
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"In a speech to the summit released on Tuesday before delivery," U.N. Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter said delegates had not done enough to address large agri-business corporations' food market dominance, according to a second Reuters article. De Schutter "said private agri-business corporations operated 'without any sort of control and with often extremely high levels of concentration that represent a serious market failure.'" He noted that the summit declaration is "silent about the right of agricultural workers to a living wage." De Schutter "also said the summit declaration was weak on the production and use of biofuels and on commodity market speculation, despite the impact of both on prices."
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At a recent U.N. forum, food and agriculture businesses "said they were already investing millions of dollars in sustainable farm development to secure reliable supplies, cut costs and boost positions on new markets" (Aloisi, 11/17). During his speech, De Schutter noted that failure to address "what he saw as the key factors behind price spikes in 2008" would result in a "new food price crisis," another Reuters articles reports. In an interview, he said, "There are indications already, because oil prices are going up and they are very closely linked to agricultural commodities prices. As soon as a big producer will be in difficulty ... speculation will set in" (Aloisi [2], 11/17).
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Though "farmers are not part of the official delegations" at the world food summit, "they came anyhow to express their views, since, they say, it is their communities that are most impacted by the food crisis," Inter Press Service Europe writes in an article examining farmers' perspective on food security.
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"Small-scale producers from the Amazonian rainforest, from Africa, the Pacific islands and the Himalayas gathered in Rome for the Peoples' Food Sovereignty Forum (Nov. 13-17), held in parallel to the FAO meetings, to discuss the serious effects of the crisis in their communities." According to the forum organizers, there are more than 1.5 billion small food producers in the world and they "produce more than 75 percent of the world's food needs through peasant agriculture and small scale livestock production, and with artisanal fishing" (Zaccaro, 11/18).
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The Financial Times reports: "The latest in a series of fairly fruitless international gatherings ends on Wednesday in Rome, as the United Nations food security summit draws to a halt amid a plethora of platitudes about feeding the poor." According to the newspaper, "The broad approach of the summit is right to recognise that achieving a safe, reliable, affordable supply of food is a multi-faceted project: technology, trade, markets and aid all need to be addressed. But translating this into practical action has proved difficult – not least because agriculture, with its concentrated groups of farmers and agribusinesses and diffuse groups of consumers, has proved peculiarly susceptible to producer group lobbying." The article looks at some of the reasons why it is challenging to address hunger around the world (Beattie, 11/17).
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Incidents involving some world leaders "bolstered criticism" that this week's summit "is long on rhetoric and extravagance and short on solutions for the world's 1 billion hungry," the Associated Press reports in an article examining why some view the meeting as a failure. The article discusses the actions of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe who has been "blamed for plunging his people into starvation" (David/D’Emilio, 11/17).

ROME (AP) -- World leaders at a food summit on Monday rallied around a new strategy to fight global hunger and help poor countries feed themselves, but failed to pledge funds sought by the U.N.
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The summit approved its final declaration during its first hours in a show of broad consensus. Countries pledged to substantially increase aid to agriculture in developing nations, so that the world's 1 billion hungry can become more self-sufficient.
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The summit did not commit to a specific figure of $44 billion a year for agricultural aid that the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says will be necessary in the coming decades.
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The agency, which is hosting the three-day summit at its Rome headquarters, had also hoped countries would adopt 2025 as a deadline to eradicate hunger. But the declaration instead focused on a pledge set nine years ago to halve the number of hungry people by 2015.
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Shortly before delegates approved the declaration, the U.N. chief called on rich and powerful countries to tackle "unacceptable" global hunger.
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"The world has more than enough food," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegates at the meeting in Rome. "Yet, today, more than 1 billion people are hungry. This is unacceptable."
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Pope Benedict XVI will be among the speakers Monday, adding his moral authority to what U.N. officials hope will be a solid start to a change in aid policies at a time when hunger affects one in six people on the planet.
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So far, helping the world's hungry has largely entailed wealthy nations sending food assistance rather than technology, irrigation help, fertilizer or high-yield seed that could assist local farmers, livestock herders and fishermen. Much of this food assistance is purchased from the wealthy nations' own farmers.
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But FAO says the best way to stop hunger is to help the needy help themselves. This approach "lies at the core of food security," Ban said. "Our job is not just to feed the hungry, but to empower the hungry to feed themselves."
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The summit is being held at a time "when the international community recognizes it has neglected agriculture for many years," the FAO said Sunday. "Sustained investment in agriculture -- especially small-holder agriculture -- is acknowledged as the key to food security."
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The gathering hopes to build momentum on a shift toward more aid to agriculture that was first laid out in July at a Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, central Italy. There, leaders of developed nations pledged to spend $20 billion in the next three years to help farmers in poor countries.

A little bit of initiative and sound policies will ensure everyone has access to food
JOHANNESBURG, 12 November 2009 (IRIN) -
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Did you know that agriculture contributed 42 percent of Nigeria's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008, more than double the 20 percent of revenue that oil brought into the national coffers?
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A programme to boost food security, launched in 2001, helped Nigeria's rain-dependant small-scale farmers with irrigation and access to credit and marketing services, said a new UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report taking an in-depth look at 16 countries that have made some headway in reducing the number of hungry people.
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Barbara Huddleston, an FAO food security expert, said the study was produced as part of the effort to "stimulate interest in investing in smallholders, asking countries and donors to make a commitment in real people" ahead of the World Food security Summit in Rome, Italy, next week.
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These are examples of people choosing to step out of their comfort zones and risk innovation; these people did not wait for external agencies to step in Two reports published this week draw attention to agriculture with a caseload of good news stories on improving food security. The FAO report, Pathways to Success, looks at policy initiatives that have improved food security, and new measures taken in the wake of last year's global recession.
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The US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) uses its book, MillionsFed, to look at a mix of food security success stories over a period of years, many of which were driven by NGOs and communities. In 1990 an initiative driven by Helen Keller International, which works to prevent blindness and reduce malnutrition, and local organizations in Bangladesh encouraged 1,000 households to plant vegetables rich in vitamin A to address a deficiency in this micronutrient, which can cause night blindness: at that time 30,000 children in the South Asian country were going blind each year.
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The programme, eventually driven by 70 local NGOs and the government, grew to cover 870,000 households across the country by 2003, and helped improve the food security of nearly five million people - almost four percent of the population. There is also the IFPRI story of farmers on Burkina Faso's central plateau who have been sowing crops in planting pits and built contour bunds - rows of stones piled up along the contours of the land to capture rainwater runoff and prevent soil erosion - and have produced an additional 80,000 tonnes of food per year.
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"These are examples of people choosing to step out of their comfort zones and risk innovation; these people did not wait for external agencies to step in," said Rajul Pandya-Lorch, co-editor of MillionsFed. "We want to highlight the importance of creating the space to allow people to take risks and experiment." The case studies underline that there is "no single, simple solution to helping farmers be more productive", said Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which commissioned MillionsFed.
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"A comprehensive approach is needed - from investing in improved seeds and healthy soil to supporting effective farm management practices and expanding small farmers' access to markets," he said. Such efforts pay off with investment in science and technology - improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides - hallmarks of the "green revolution" that turned around food production in Asia from 1965 to 1990.
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Policy decisions like liberalizing agricultural markets, giving land-rights to farmers, investing in rural infrastructure and agricultural extension services also help. The FAO report points out that 84 percent of Vietnam's paddy fields are irrigated, so rice farmers no longer have to depend on the rain. "In just five years, from 1993 to 1998, the share of people living in poverty fell by 21 percent [in Vietnam]," noted IFPRI, which has also devoted a chapter to land reforms in Vietnam.
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The IFPRI and FAO initiatives have many examples of useful ideas to inspire communities and governments. And there is hope - at least 31 out of 79 countries monitored by FAO have registered a significant decline in the number of undernourished people since the early 1990s.