Commodity Corner

Millions Fed: some solutions close at hand

More than a billion people go hungry each day — about the same number as did in the late 1950s. That’s both a “tragedy on a grand scale” and an “astounding success,” according to a new report called “Millions Fed,” produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.      While the absolute number of hungry people is the same as it was 40 years ago, the proportion is dramatically smaller — one in six today, compared to one in three then, the report said. It illustrates 20 successful case studies where progress has been made in the fight against hunger.

Some solutions come from science: new varieties of wheat, rice, beans, maize, cassava, millet and sorghum. Others deal with markets, government policies, or the environment.      Two farmers from the Sahel region of Africa, oft plagued by drought and famine, visited Washington last month to talk about solutions they found close to home — one of the success stories trumpeted in “Millions Fed.”      Almost 30 years ago, farmers in Burkina Faso experimented with a traditional technique called “zai,” digging pits in their plots and adding manure to improve soils before the rainy season, resulting in dramatically better yields.      “There was a long period of drought in my village,” Yacouba Sawadogo told reporters. “Many people left because their life was very, very difficult. But I decided to stay,” he said, explaining how he taught others the technique.      In Niger, farmers manage trees on their land to prevent erosion, improve yields, and provide livestock fodder. Before, women had to walk 6 miles to get firewood, but now they have enough for themselves and to sell to others, said Sakina Mati, who coordinates tree projects in six villages.      The projects have improved 13 million acres of farmland and fed 3 million people, said Oxfam America, a development group that works with the farmers.      It’s food for thought as rich nations ramp up efforts to help small farmers grow more food in poor countries. “In our approach toward solutions and programs, we really need to listen as well as talk,” said Gawain Kripke of Oxfam.      “Solutions don’t always come from us.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Yacouba Sawadogo on his farm in Burkina Faso /Courtesy of Oxfam America

Blanche Lincoln and her committee of chairmen

On the congressional scale of measurement, Blanche Lincoln got a plum of a birthday present — the gavel as Senate committee chairman. She is the first woman to head the Agriculture Committee. Amid the congratulatory banter on Sept 30, Lincoln’s 49th birthday, were reminders of the enduring power of its members, past and present.

As Lincoln noted, her committee includes the chairmen of four other committees — Budget, Judiciary, Finance and Health. It is a higher number of sitting chairmen than most Senate committees and allows a useful melding of interests.

Finance chairman Max Baucus and Budget chairman Kent Conrad used their jurisdictions to help write the 2008 farm law, for example, sometimes in seeming competition with Tom Harkin, who passed the gavel to Lincoln and is now Health chairman. Harkin holds a historical footnote for chairing Agriculture twice.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is an Agriculture member as well. In years past, Republican Bob Dole and Democrat Tom Daschle served on Agriculture while also party leaders in the Senate.

Chairmen are thick on the ground in the Agriculture Committee by another gauge too. Five of its former chairmen sit at the head of the table with Lincoln — Democrats Harkin and Pat Leahy on her right and Republicans Saxby Chambliss, Richard Lugar and Thad Cochran on her left.

“Maybe we should have a special chairman’s pin (for) former chairmen,” remarked Leahy, now Judiciary chairman.

Further down the table are Republicans Pat Roberts of Kansas, a former House Agriculture Committee chairman, and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, who resigned as U.S. agriculture secretary two years ago to run for the Senate.

Vilsack rips media over swine flu, I mean, H1N1

Hog markets are depressed. Farmers struggle to put food on the table. Hard times are seeping into the rural economy, hurting owners of grocery and hardware stores.

Blame the media, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, unleashing several lengthy rants about the evils of oversimplification during a 25-minute teleconference with reporters on Thursday.

Vilsack scolded the media for continuing to call the new strain of pandemic H1N1 flu by its more common name: swine flu.

“It is not swine flu,” Vilsack thundered. “Every time that is said, consumers get confused. Schools that are considering purchases for school lunch and school breakfast programs get confused, get worried.”

Vilsack implied that pork consumption is down because people worry they can catch swine flu — whoops, H1N1 — from eating pork. (You can’t.) Instead of stressing safety of pork, or sharing details about how the USDA plans to keep watch for the flu-that-shall-not-be-named in hogs, Vilsack dressed down reporters for harming farmers.

“I know this may seem difficult for people, or silly, unless you’re the pork producer, unless you’re out there trying to make a living and take care of your family,” said Vilsack, heading straight over the top.

“And you pick up the paper, you turn on the radio, you turn on the television, and you see this thing mischaracterized, and then you try to go to the market and sell your pork, and you get less than what you’re spending to produce it. And so you’ve got to tell your family you’ve got to do without.”

U.S. soy planting record possible, corn out of reach

U.S. farmers could set a record for soybean plantings this year, topping 2008′s 75.7 million acres. The Agriculture Department will release its initial projection of seedings later this week. Some economists see plantings of 79 million acres (32.9 million ha) given that market prices and production costs currently favor soybeans.

Most expect corn plantings to lose ground as global recession takes the shine off demand from livestock and ethanol. But it would be daunting to break the U.S. corn plantings record even if the biofuels boom were re-ignited.

Corn seedings hit 93.5 million acres (37.8 million ha) in 2007 in a land rush to profit on ethanol. Although it was the largest total since 1943, it ranks 16th at USDA. The largest corn planting on record is a giant 113 million acres in 1932 — 21 percent larger than 2007. It may not give a full picture of corn-growing in America.

USDA began recording corn plantings in 1926. It has records of corn harvest area from 1866. From 1909-18, harvest area usually exceeded 100 million acres, so plantings had to be much larger, to allow for abandonment and other uses. In 1926, for instance, plantings were 99.7 million acres and harvest area was 83.3 million acres, a decline of 16 million acres. In recent years, the shrinkage from plantings to harvest area has been around 7.5 million acres, mostly for silage.

There are plenty of reasons for large corn plantings in the early 20th century. Corn was needed to feed the vast herds of horses and mules used as draft animals on the farm and in the city before gasoline power was adopted. Corn is easy to store. Livestock could glean cornfields after harvest. And, yields were a lot lower — 25.7 bushels an acre in 1926 for a crop of 2.14 billion bushels. In 2008, the corn crop was 12.1 billion bushels with a yield of 153.9 bushels an acre from 86 million acres.

–Charles Abbott

    Five largest soybean plantings     (Records begin in 1924)      75.718 million acres, 2008      75.522 million acres, 2006      75.208 million acres, 2004      74.226 million acres, 2000      74.075 million acres, 2001      

The answer is 99,439. Pass it on.

During his first week on the job, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said no one knows for sure how many people work at the Agriculture Department. Speaking to USDA employees and later to reporters, he used that startling anomaly as an argument to update USDA’s computer equipment.

Like the admonition against saying “never” or “always” during an argument, there could be a corollary: Never say “no one knows” in a bureaucracy.

A USDA employee quickly provided an answer for Reuters: 99,439 fulltime, part-time and temporary federal employees as of Monday based on figures from the payroll agency.

There were some qualifiers in Vilsack’s statement. He said he asked the Obama transition team and “I was told no one knows for sure how many people work at (USDA). They could tell me how many checks are issued, but not how many people actually work here.”

A former USDA official snorted at the idea of an uncountable workforce. ”That may be almost an urban myth,” he said. “It’s not a simple answer” but is within reach.

There are some complexities. For example, USDA employment rises to include Forest Service “smoke jumpers” and wildfire crews during the summer and shrinks during the winter.

Then there’s the roughly 9,400 people in the county offices who are part of the Farm Service Agency. They perform federal tasks but are hired by locally elected committees.