Food production in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region is limited, mainly due to a scarcity of arable land and water. This limitation is aggravated by the overdependence on food imports, which makes the region vulnerable to shocks in prices and supplies of commodities on world markets. Meanwhile, food loss and waste in the 19 countries of the region comes in at almost 30 per cent of the overall production. Meeting in Rome last week, the ministers of agriculture of the NENA region, together with representatives of NGOs and the private sector, highlighted such problems and tried to find solutions within the framework of the 32nd such meeting of the NENA countries. With the number of chronically undernourished people in the NENA region currently standing at 79.4 million, Fatima Hachem, food and nutrition officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told the Weekly that state of food security in the region is deteriorating. “While most of the countries of the region belong to the high and middle income categories, we find that the children-stunting ratio, a mean manifestation of malnutrition, is as high as 25 per cent. In Yemen, due to poverty and political unrest one in every two children under five years of age is stunted. Moreover,in Egypt, which is a moderate income country, one in every three children less than five years of age is stunted. This is very worrisome,” Hachem said. At the same time, this so-called “double burden of malnutrition” has continued to accelerate, with 24.5 per cent of children under five being stunted and nearly one quarter of the population becoming obese. “We are seeing obese mothers of malnourished children. This is because they depend mainly on carbohydrates in their food, leading to gaining weight in adults and malnourishment in children,” she added. Another structural flaw that affects the state of food security in the region is the fact that it mainly depends on imports to cover its food needs. From 2006 to 2010, the region imported 47 per cent of its needs of cereals, alone accounting for 40 per cent of the region's total food imports. “The problem is not only the reliance on food imports. It is also the increase in this reliance. If a country covers 50 per cent of its needs by buying from foreign markets, this means that over the years, and with the increase in population and prices, the real value and volume of imports are doubling even if the percentage remains the same. A country becomes more vulnerable to shocks in prices or quantities in international food markets as a result,” Hag al-Amin Nasredin, policies consultant and food expert at the FAO regional office, said. Experts attending the Rome meeting referred several times to plans to build up regional stocks of commodities to hedge against shocks in the international markets, like what happened in 2007 and 2008. According to Nasredin, building national reserves comes with drawbacks, however. ”Forming stocks and keeping them is expensive, and the prices of commodities zigzag, so you can build up a stock of a commodity whose price then declines. Having regional stocks might be helpful provided that there is rational management of these reserves and the political will to form them, however.” Nasredin said that volatile international food prices were likely to continue due to the use of biofuels, climate change, and increases in income levels leading to increased consumption in some countries such as China. Conflicts and civil insecurity had worsened the situation, experts at the meeting said, and they had been a driving factor behind food insecurity in the region in 2012 and 2013. In Syria, the outbreak in violence starting in March 2011 had left 6.3 million Syrians highly vulnerable and in critical need of food and agriculture support. In addition, 2.4 million refugees had fled Syria to neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, compounding the already difficult economic situations in these countries. Syria is a major trading partner for all its neighbouring countries in food and agriculture and a major transit route to and from the countries of Eastern Europe and the Near East Region, in particular to the Gulf States. As a result, problems there have led to a decline in total agricultural trade in addition to negative impacts on small-scale producers and workers along the supply chains of most agricultural commodities. According to a FAO report on the effects of the Syrian crisis on the livelihood of neighbouring countries, Syrian refugees have been bringing their crops, particularly olives, into Turkey to sell on local markets well below market prices, resulting in a fall in local commodity prices to the detriment of Turkish farmers. Also,the conflicts in Yemen, coupled with poverty and trans-boundary threats, have left 10.5 million people, or 58 per cent of the population, in a situation of food insecurity. Almost one quarter of these people work in the agricultural sector. The child malnutrition rate in Yemen is the second highest worldwide. “There is a direct relationship between conflicts and hunger, and no country is truly secure if it does not have food security,” José Graziano da Silva, the FAO director-general, said in a meeting with media representatives during the conference. The lack of funds needed to tackle the impact of these conflicts was a problem, with da Silva saying that of the US$44 million the FAO had said it needed to help refugees and farmers in neighbouring countries it had only received US$2 million. One of the shocking figures about a region that can't produce enough food is the fact that it loses and wastes between 30 and 40 per cent of its food in the production and consumption stages. This figure reaches 45 per cent for fruit and vegetables, with country-specific data indicating that a substantial part, as high as 29 per cent for fresh vegetables in Egypt, of these losses occurring at the post-harvest stage. The reasons for these losses include poor farming systems and deficient infrastructure and practices at all post-harvest stages of the supply chain. The NENA region's previous conference had recommended reducing food loss and waste in the region by 50 per cent within 10 years, and this year's conference discussed a regional strategic framework for further reductions. Besides food, the conference also discussed fresh water resources in the Middle East region, which are 10 per cent of the world average and are projected to decrease by 50 per cent by 2050 if current trends in population growth and consumption patterns continue. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that while agriculture consumes 85 per cent of these resources, productivity does not always match the needs of populations. Mohamed Bazza, a water expert at the FAO, told the Weekly that while this productivity was higher than that of Africa, Asia and Latin America, this was not good enough as they had much greater water resources. He said that the private sector had to be more involved in managing the region's water resources, meaning companies providing farmers with up-to-date irrigation machines and techniques and a greater reliance on farmers associations. Da Silva said that the political instability in the region had hindered investments in water projects, which were necessarily long term. How could investors reach agreements with the government in Egypt if there had been four irrigation ministers in the span of three years, he asked. The role of women in agriculture and food security had also been overlooked, the experts said. Among men, rural-to-urban migration has been on the rise, while women are often left in rural areas to take care of land and cattle. However, despite their important role in agriculture, women in the NENA region still own less land than men. This lack of land ownership limits women's capacity to improve agricultural productivity and to sustain their livelihoods, as it limits access to decision-making processes, support systems, new technologies, rural services and training. Women also hold smaller land plots than men. The conference shed light on the means to narrow the gender gap in agriculture by calling for the formulation and implementation of gender-sensitive food security and rural poverty reduction policies, sustained by adequate budget allocations. The FAO is currently working on a project to improve children's nutrition in five Upper Egyptian governorates. The project is financed by the Italian government and is based on teaching mothers and young people how to provide children with well-balanced diets. This includes choosing families from small villages and teaching the mothers how to produce vegetables and fruit and how to raise cattle and chickens at home to secure a well-balanced diet for their children, Hachem told the Weekly.
