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Showing posts with label North Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Africa. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Water, fundamental for food security in North Africa, Near East

Access to water is a fundamental need for food security, human health and agriculture, and its looming scarcity in the North Africa and Middle East region, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said in Cairo, that this is a huge challenge requiring an "urgent and massive response."

Accessible fresh water in the region, he said, has fallen by two-thirds in the past 40 years.

“It now amounts to 10 times less per capita availability than the worldwide average, underscoring the need for a significant overhaul of farming systems, he said.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that a recent study by FAO showed that higher temperatures may shorten growing seasons in the region by 18 days and reduce agricultural yields a further 27 per cent to 55 per cent less by the end of this century.

The rising sea level in the Nile Delta, FAO said, is exposing Egypt to the danger of losing substantial parts of the most productive agriculture land due to salinization.

"Competition between water-usage sectors will only intensify in the future between agriculture, energy, industrial production and household needs," he said.

Graziano da Silva attended a high-level meeting covering FAO's collaboration with Egypt on the ‘1.5 million feddan initiative', the government's plan to reclaim eventually up to two million hectares of desert land for agricultural and other uses.

He expressed his strong support to the Egyptian Authorities and committed to back programmes aiming at addressing water scarcity and promoting climate resilient agriculture.


The Director-General's visit to Egypt included meetings with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Agriculture and Land Reclamation, Investment and International Cooperation, as well as the Secretary General of the League of Arab States.

Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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Thursday, August 6, 2015

China, others cause food price crash in July---FAO




NaijaAgroNet
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has revealed that in July, the dairy price index dropped 7.2 per cent from the previous month, mainly due to lower import demand from China.

Other regions which contributed to the crash in prices, NaijaAgroNet gathered, include Middle East and North Africa along with abundant European Union (EU) milk production which has resulted in good availability of dairy products for export.

The FAO Food Price Index averaged 164.6 points in July, down 1.0 per cent from June, and 19.4 per cent from a year earlier. The trade-weighted index tracks prices on international markets of five major food commodity groups: cereals, meat, dairy products, vegetable oils and sugar.

The July, NaijaAgroNet reports, vegetable oil price index was some 5.5 per cent below its June level, reaching its lowest value since July 2009. The recent slide was primarily caused by a fall in international palm oil prices due to increased production in Southeast Asia combined with slower exports especially from Malaysia, and a further weakening of soy oil prices on ample supplies for export in South America and a favourable outlook for global supply in 2015/16.

The cereal price index, NaijaAgroNet reports, rose by 2.0 per cent from June, but was still 10.1 per cent below July last year's level. For the second consecutive month, higher wheat and maize prices, in part due to unfavourable weather in North America and Europe, kept the cereal index rising, but rice prices continued to fall.

In July the meat price index remained nearly unchanged from the previous month. An increase in international prices of bovine meat offset a decline for pig meat and ovine meat, while prices for poultry remained stable. The sugar price index rose by 2.5 per cent from June 2015, largely due to less than ideal harvesting conditions in the main producing region of Brazil, NaijaAgroNet learnt.

Cyriacus Nnaji/GEE

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