AlertNet News Blog - Development in Arab world masks high food insecurity

 http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/alertnet-news-blog/development-in-arab-world-masks-high-food-insecurity/

By Katie Nguyen
It's already a year since rising food prices helped ignite protests that gave us our biggest news story in 2011 - the Arab Spring.

Popular anger over high food prices fuelled resentment that was already there; resentment about the inequalities between rich and poor, the widespread corruption and oppression in the region - fostered by its ageing, autocratic rulers.

Food security in the Arab world is once again in the spotlight this week as Beirut hosts a conference, bringing together leading thinkers in fields relating to food security - economics, agriculture, trade, water, health and nutrition.

"Given the development level and the income level in the Arab world in general, food insecurity is much higher than in the rest of the world," economist Clemens Breisinger tells me.

Using new, diverse sources of data, his International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reportshows that ensuring food security - the availability of food and people's access to it - is particularly difficult in the Arab region (which in the report encompasses Arab League members Turkey and Iran). It says poverty and income inequality rates in the region are higher than officials numbers have suggested.

Breisinger cites the Arab world's dependency on food imports as a reason why it is especially vulnerable to global price volatility.
 
Other challenges include rising food demand driven by the second highest population growth in the world after sub-Saharan Africa and limited potential for agricultural production due to a lack of water, he says.

"Officially, less than 20 percent of the population in the Arab region lives under the $2/day poverty line, but income-only measures can be misleading," IFPRI said in a press release.

"Child undernutrition rates, an alternate and arguably more comprehensive measure of food security, are high and have not decreased with GDP growth to the same extent as other regions in the world."

It said in the Arab region, one in five children is stunted but the prevalence of child undernutrition in countries like Sudan and Yemen is double that or even higher.

Women hold their children as they wait for food from the World Food Programme (WFP) in the north-western Yemeni city of Hajja in this photo from June 2010. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah