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Guinea Bissau: How to Avoid a Food Crisis Again This Year
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
29 February 2008
Posted to the web 29 February 2008
Bissau
According to the government's current estimates, donors will need to provide 20,000 tonnes of food aid to compensate for expected production shortfalls in 2008.
Aid experts in Bissau, however, said that if the government had better policies, and if the rains came at the right time, the country should be able to feed itself with current levels of international assistance.
"The government has to act quickly before it's too late," UN World Food Programme (WFP) head of programmes Jean-Martin Bauer told IRIN. "With smart policies the problems of previous years can be avoided," he said.
During the so called 'lean season' in 2007, from June to August, 43 percent of people in rural areas did not have adequate food, according to WFP, and some 20 percent of the population of 1.6 million received food aid. Bauer said it was possible the situation could become worse this year but currently WFP stocks were based on roughly the same level of need as 2007.
Guinea-Bissau has good soils and high rainfall but poor infrastructure to bring goods to market. It also has ineffective agricultural practices that make food security highly dependent on external factors such as world commodity prices and the weather.
Rice, the country's staple, is mostly farmed without irrigation systems so a good harvest is largely a matter of luck, agricultural experts say. The government also faces financial constraints, with an agriculture budget of just 400 million CFA francs (US$917,000). "That's hardly enough for the Ministry of Agriculture to pay its employees and keep functioning," UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) programme officer Rui Fonseca told IRIN.
But he and others say the government could take action to minimise food shortfalls.
Officials from FAO and other UN agencies got together in 2007 to write a letter to the government, with specific recommendations and calling for discussions. "The government is yet to respond," Fonseca said. "We have almost no information on what it is planning."
"Rice-to-cashew ratio"
The core of Guinea Bissau's food security problem is what Bauer calls "the rice-to-cashew ratio". Farmers cannot grow enough rice to feed their families all year round so traditionally they have grown cashews which they sell or exchange for imported rice.
At one time farmers could sell a kilo of raw cashews for 200 CFA francs (40 US cents) which was the same price they could buy a kilo of imported rice. However, with more countries in the world growing cashews for export, world prices have dropped while rice prices have risen, largely because of transport costs and an increase in world demand in cereals.
During last year's March-May cashew harvest, Guinea Bissau's farmers sold their cashews for an average of 20 US cents a kilo, according to a survey conducted by WFP and the Ministry of Agriculture, while imported rice cost 50 US cents and has since gone up to 65 US cents and higher.
In the long run, Guinea Bissau farmers need to diversify what they grow so they do not only depend on cashews for cash - and consumers need to eat more sweet potatoes and other roots which are readily available. On 20 February FAO signed a $1.5 million project with the government to help diversify production, but it is unlikely to do much to reduce potential food shortages which are expected as early as June 2008.
Recommended cashew policy
In the meantime experts have a list of measures the government could take. One is to improve exports by lowering taxes. (Governments in many other cashew-producing countries do not impose such taxes on exporters).
Another is to allow transporters to export overland to Senegal rather than require them to pass through the port of Bissau, which is slow and expensive. "The port here doesn't really function," Carlos Schwarz Silva, who heads the food security non-governmental organisation Acção para Desenvolvimento, told IRIN. "And I am not aware of anything being done to fix it."
Other measures he and other experts call for include an end to the many illegal taxes at road blocks which local authorities demand of trucks transporting cashews and rice, as well as a reorganisation of the export market. "Currently there are too many middlemen each taking a profit and that reduces farmers' earnings," Silva said.
He also said the government should be monitoring world cashew prices and broadcasting the information every day on local radio. "This would help traders and farmers make more informed decisions about when to buy and sell," he said.
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