Devex Dish: Why WFP is watching rice

Rice prices are up, and the World Food Programme is worried. At last month’s U.N. General Assembly, I sat down with WFP Chief Economist Arif Husain to discuss what he is watching when it comes to the global food crisis.

Husain tells me the world has consistently missed opportunities to reform the food system when its weaknesses are exposed — such as happened in 2008 when rising rice prices contributed heavily to food insecurity, particularly in West Africa. Because the world remains so dependent on so few countries for key staple exports, a crisis in one country or region — say, Russia and Ukraine — causes ripples everywhere else.

But floods in Pakistan are a bigger danger to the rice market — not so far directly affected by the war in Ukraine — as the country will have to shift from being the world’s fourth-biggest exporter of the good to a net importer after water inundated fields across the country last month.

“Our tendency is that as soon as the problem goes away, we go back to our usual business,” Husain tells me of the typical cycle of crisis response.

He also cautioned against too much celebration that prices of staple crops such as wheat are declining. They might be down from their peak after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, he says, but they’re still at 10-year-high levels.

WFP chief economist: 'We're worried' about rice prices (Pro)

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Up in smoke

Humanitarian access gains made in Tigray following a truce in the embattled region of Ethiopia have “evaporated” since fighting began again in August, according to Michael Dunford, regional director for eastern Africa at WFP. He says during the five months after the truce, WFP brought 240,000 metric tons of aid into the region on over 8,000 trucks. The agency also moved 2.5 million liters of fuel into the region for its and other humanitarian organizations’ operations.

Now WFP can’t move trucks or fuel into the region and all current food distributions are from food brought in before the renewed fighting. This comes as an estimated 89% of the population — 5.2 million people — have limited food capacity, with over 40% of them acutely food insecure.

Read: WFP regional director says 'virtually no aid access in Tigray'

Number munching

That’s the amount of global support needed to eradicate food insecurity, according to the International Monetary Fund. They’re also out with a stark warning that the global food price shock is at least as bad as the devastating crisis of 2007-08 — and could worsen. My colleague Shabtai Gold reports that 48 vulnerable countries are seeing their import bills climb by about $9 billion over the next two years.

To help, the IMF board on Friday approved a new emergency financing window that enables countries to borrow funds to support balance-of-payment issues arising from the shocks, both on the import and export sides. The new 12-month window will allow countries to borrow up to 50% of their IMF share quota — a measure of a country’s stake in the fund and relative economic size — to cope with higher food and fertilizer costs.

What’s at stake? In addition to an increase in deaths, high food insecurity has historically been associated with “social unrest, conflict, and large-scale migration,” the IMF writes.

Read: IMF scrambles to ease worst food price shock in more than a decade

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A mouthful

WFP is of course not the only institution where economists are worriedly watching the global food crisis. Lampietti and his colleague, World Bank Lead Agriculture Economist Madhur Gautam, give Shabtai the insider view of the bank’s response to the situation. This includes strengthening safety nets, Lampietti tells Shabtai, as well as figuring out how to help farmers get more efficient at fertilizer application.

But building a better food system requires focusing on resilience building, Lampietti says. This means helping countries see better ways to utilize subsidies — which for agriculture currently totals $640 billion — as well as supporting basics such as soil health.

World Bank: 'We're nowhere near out of the woods' on food price crisis (Pro)

Age-old dilemma

Time and again, needs assessments from HelpAge International show that no one has reached out to and consulted older people about what they need or how they can contribute during a humanitarian emergency. The drought in East Africa has been a test case, considering older people are literally starving to death. But their very specific nutrition needs are seldom being factored into aid responses.

Seventy-one-year-old Dido Yaro Ruchi of Kenya said: “Although there are people who generally sympathize with old people like me, during food relief distributions, people scramble for it and that becomes a challenge for us elderly people.”

This is in direct contravention of core humanitarian standards of inclusivity, HelpAge International’s Carole Ageng’o writes in an op-ed for Devex.

Opinion: Older people are ignored in emergencies to everyone’s peril

Chew on this

IFAD is in talks to become a partner of a $45 billion IMF lending initiative to help small-scale producers and farmers cope with climate change in vulnerable countries. [Euronews]

The full U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Global Food Security Reauthorization Act of 2022, which reauthorizes Feed the Future. [House Foreign Affairs Committee]

The Asian Development Bank will provide at least $14 billion from 2022–2025 to ease a worsening food crisis in Asia and the Pacific. [ADB]

The Biden administration announced $8 billion in public and private commitments at its domestic Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health to decrease food insecurity and diet-related diseases. [The White House]