Southern Africa: huge maize shortages predicted for 2008

[Hail Columbia]

http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=21267&

A 'devastating shortage' of the staple maize crop is being predicted for all but just a few countries south of the Sahara for the 2007/2008 season.

Only a few southern African countries (Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania) were expecting excess-harvests of maize ("corn"), the Southern Southern African Development Community (SADC) warned in December last year.

However this prediction was made before this week's floods devastated the new maize plantings in southern-Zambia's commercial-production fields.

Agriculture and environment ministers from the December 2007 fourteen-nation SADC meeting in the Zambian capital of Lusaka had urged member countries 'to put in place measures to avoid critical food shortages next year. "

SADC deputy executive secretary Joao Caholo said southern Africa was expected to experience a shortage of at least 4.35 million metric tonnes of maize.

Their December 2007 forecast was not as gloomy for all countries, however: Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia were expected to record cereal surpluses, they said at that time.

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/africa/new...

Zambian maize crop destroyed by floods:
However this predicted maize-shortage may be larger than feared: It was reported on January 8 2008 from Zambia that its maize crop has been destroyed in a devastating flood which also killed 21 people.

President of umbrella farmers group the Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU), Guy Robinson, said heavy rains across Zambia had wiped out some plantings, while some of the crop had lost nutrients due to excessive water and lack of sunshine.

This season's white-maize crop was expected to be more than last year's 1.36-million tons.

However he now says that the entire crop may have been destroyed in some areas due to heavy flooding and it is still raining heavily," Robinson said.
He said the most affected area was southern Zambia, one of the country's major farming regions.

"The current rain (pattern) is not good for farming, the crops are suffering due to lack of sunshine and the fertiliser has been washed away. The plants will need a lot of nitrogen to grow," Robinson said.
The government has placed 34 districts on flood alert.
http://somalinet.com/news/world/Africa/14147

Other excess-maize crops are expected in Malawi, with a surplus projected to be 1-million tonnes; and South Africa's 7-million tonnes, which is a production just enough to feed the entire country's residents and livestock with - but would not leave enough for export. Maize farmers also were planning to sell off some of their crops to biofuel companies this year, although the SA government is trying to prevent them from doing so.

LINKS:

MALAWI: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/FEWS...

SOUTH AFRICA: http://ceemarketwatch.com/search.html?q=cec&s...

The food shortages in Africa are a serious matter, as the world is also eating more food than it now produces and food shortages are being predicted world-wide this year - so Africa for the first time in hundreds of years, now can no longer rely on their usual, inexpensive foreign food sources which had always been so reliable in the past...

Worldwide, food prices may in fact climb for years because of expansion of farming for fuel and climate change, risking social unrest, an expert and a new report said this week.

"The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next two years as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years, according to one of the world’s leading agricultural researchers.

The social unrest over food-shortages has already started:

On January 1 2008 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, thousands of people queued up early at fixed rate food shops run by paramilitary troops -- as prices of rice and other consumables rose alarmingly in retail markets.

The military's troops' shops do not reach the vast majority of Bangladesh's more than 140 million people, who live in villages and suffered from repeated loss of crops due to floods and cyclones in the past year.

Traders and officials say food prices more than doubled since the army-backed interim government took over last January, promising to tackle what it said were "syndicates" (dishonest traders) pushing food prices up.
http://www.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20...

There also were recent 'pasta protests' in Italy, 'tortilla rallies' in Mexico and 'onion demonstrations' in India -- and food experts see these as the forerunners of the social instability to come worldwide, unless there is a fundamental shift to boost production of staple foods, warned Joachim von Braun.
He heads IFPRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute, an organisation with close links to international food-producers.
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNew...

And the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index jumped almost 40 percent this year from its 2006 level, the highest since it was launched in 1990.

FAO chief Jacques Diouf pointed to political unrest over food markets in countries like Yemen and Senegal.

"There is a very serious risk that there will be less people able to get access to food because of prices," Diouf said.

Speaking to reporters in Rome, Diouf said the FAO was ready to allocate an initial $17 million of its own funds to a voucher program so that poor farmers could pay for materials like seeds and fertilizer needed to boost farm output.

[Ambiorix]

so , what's the problem?
We ask our firends, the muslims , to make 2008 a ramaddan-year.