Valentina Sleptsova challenged the president on why bananas from Ecuador are now cheaper in Russia than domestically produced carrots and asked how her mother can survive on a “subsistence wage” with the cost of staples like potatoes so high, according to a recording of the annual event.

Putin acknowledged high food costs were a problem, including with “the so-called borsch basket” of basic vegetables, blaming global price increases and domestic shortages. But he said the Russian government had taken steps to address the issue and that other measures were being discussed, without elaborating.

Sleptsova represents a problem for Putin, who relies on broad public consent. The steep increases in consumer prices are unsettling some voters, particularly older Russians on small pensions who do not want to see a return to the 1990s when sky-rocketing inflation led to food shortages.

That has prompted Putin to push the government to take steps to tackle inflation. The government’s steps have included a tax on wheat exports, which was introduced last month on a permanent basis, and capping the retail price on other basic foodstuffs.

But in doing so, the president faces a tough choice: in trying to head off discontent among voters at rising prices he risks hurting Russia’s agricultural sector, with the country’s farmers complaining the new taxes are discouraging them from making long-term investments.

The moves by Russia, the world’s top wheat exporter, also have fed inflation in other countries by driving up the cost of grain. An increase in the export tax unveiled in mid-January, for example, sent global prices to their highest levels in seven years.

Putin faces no immediate political threat ahead of parliamentary elections in September after Russian authorities carried out a sweeping crackdown on opponents linked to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. Navalny’s allies have been prevented from running in the elections and are trying to persuade people to vote tactically for anyone apart from the ruling pro-Putin party even though the other main parties in contention all support the Kremlin on most major policy issues.

Broad concern

However, food prices are politically sensitive and containing rises to keep people broadly satisfied is part of Putin’s long-standing core strategy.

“If the price of cars goes up only a small number of people notice,” said a Russian official familiar with the government’s food inflation policies. “But when you buy food that you buy every day, it makes you feel like overall inflation is going up dramatically, even if it is not.”

In response to Reuters’ questions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the president was opposed to situations where the price of domestically produced products “are rising unreasonably.”

Peskov said that had nothing to do with the elections or mood of voters, adding it had been a constant priority for the president even prior to the run-up to elections. He added that it was up to the government to choose which methods to combat inflation and that it was responding both to seasonal price fluctuations and global market conditions, which have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Russia’s Economy Ministry said that the measures imposed since the start of 2021 have helped to stabilize food prices. Sugar prices are up three per cent so far this year after 6.5 per cent growth in 2020 and bread prices are up three per cent after 7.8 per cent growth in 2020, it said.

Sleptsova, who state television identified as from the city of Lipetsk in central Russia, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘Miserable help’

Consumer inflation in Russia has been rising since early 2020, reflecting a global trend during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Russian government responded in December after Putin publicly criticized it for being slow to react. It set a temporary tax on wheat exports from mid-February, before imposing it permanently from June 2. It also added temporary retail price caps on sugar and sunflower oil. The caps on sugar expired on June 1, the ones for sunflower oil are in place until Oct. 1.

But consumer inflation — which includes food as well as other goods and services — has continued to rise in Russia, up 6.5 per cent in June from a year earlier — its fastest rate in five years. The same month, food prices rose 7.9 per cent from the previous year.

Some Russians see the government’s efforts as insufficient. With real wages falling as well as high inflation, the ratings of the ruling United Russia party are languishing at a multi-year low.

Alla Atakyan, a 57-year-old pensioner from the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, told Reuters she didn’t think the measures had been sufficient and it was negatively impacting her view of the government. The price of carrots “was 40 rubles (US$0.5375), then 80 and then 100. How come?” the former teacher asked.

Moscow pensioner Galina, who asked she only be identified by her first name, also complained about steep price rises, including of bread. “The miserable help that people have been given is worth almost nothing,” the 72-year-old said.

When asked by Reuters whether its measures were sufficient, the Economy Ministry said the government was trying to minimize the administrative measures imposed because too much interference in market mechanisms in general creates risks to business development and may cause product shortages.

Peskov said that “the Kremlin considers government action to curb price rises for a range of agricultural products and foodstuffs to be very effective.”

Farming friction

Some Russian farmers say they understand the authorities’ motivation but see the tax as bad news because they believe Russian traders will pay them less for the wheat to compensate for the increased export costs.

An executive at a large farming business in southern Russia said the tax would hurt profitability and mean less money for investment in farming. “It makes sense to reduce production so as not to generate losses and to raise market prices,” he said.

Any impact on investment in farming equipment and other materials likely will not become clear until later in the year when the autumn sowing season begins.

The Russian government has invested billions of dollars in the agriculture sector in recent years. That has boosted production, helped Russia import less food, and created jobs.

If farm investment is scaled back, the agricultural revolution that transformed Russia from a net importer of wheat in the late 20th century, may start to draw to an end, farmers and analysts said.

“With the tax we are actually talking about the slow decay of our growth rate, rather than overnight revolutionary damage,” said Dmitry Rylko at the Moscow-based IKAR agriculture consultancy. “It will be a long process, it could take three to five years.”

Some may see the impact sooner. The farming business executive plus two other farmers told Reuters they planned to reduce their wheat-sowing areas in autumn 2021 and in spring 2022.

Russia’s Agriculture Ministry told Reuters that the sector remains highly profitable and that the transfer of proceeds from the new export tax to farmers would support them and their investment, therefore preventing a decline in production.

The Russian official familiar with the government’s food inflation policies said the tax will only deprive farmers of what he called an excessive margin.

“We are in favour of our producers making money on exports. But not to the detriment of their main buyers who live in Russia,” Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told the lower house of parliament in May.

Global impact

The government measures could also make Russian wheat less competitive, according to traders. They say that is because the tax, which has been changing regularly in recent weeks, makes it harder for them to secure a profitable forward sale where shipments may not take place for several weeks.

That could prompt overseas buyers to look elsewhere, to countries such as Ukraine and India, a trader in Bangladesh told Reuters. Russia has in recent years often been the cheapest supplier for major wheat buyers such as Egypt and Bangladesh.

Sales of Russian wheat to Egypt have been low since Moscow imposed the permanent tax in early June. Egypt purchased 60,000 tonnes of Russian wheat in June. It had bought 120,000 tonnes in February and 290,000 in April.

Prices for Russian grain are still competitive but the country’s taxes mean the Russian market is less predictable in terms of supply and pricing and may lead to it losing some of its share in export markets generally, said a senior government official in Egypt, the world’s top wheat buyer.

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Two generations back, they started cultivating sugar cane here in Shivthar, a village in Maharashtra’s highlands near the Krishna River. India’s most industrialized state soon became its largest sugar producer.

Today, it’s not sugar the 35-year-old Sable is talking about as he sips sweet tea in the front yard of the low, two-storey farmhouse where half the ground floor houses his turmeric crop. He’s discussing peppers, which he is now growing under polythene plastic coverings.

Like an increasing number of farmers in India, Sable is exploiting a shift in taste towards fruits and vegetables among Indians. “My colleagues grow flowers under poly,” Sable says. “But the investment for that is too much for me, so I’m trying out peppers. You can’t eat flowers if you can’t find buyers for them,” he notes.

While many Indian farmers are eager to adjust to changing diets in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets, the government continues to subsidize the cultivation of wheat, sugar and rice crops to ensure basic food needs for the country’s half a billion poor.

The result is overflowing stocks of these carbohydrate-heavy staples and a huge subsidy bill that is adding to a ballooning budget deficit.

India, many agricultural experts say, is spending billions to prop up a traditional farm sector at the expense of investment in new crops and agricultural innovation.

But in a country where one out of five Indians goes hungry, the government has had to focus on foods that fuel or fill — carbohydrate-heavy wheat, rice and sugar. About 36 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men in India are underweight. The costs of that undernourishment is high in terms of health care, lost productivity and poor quality of life.

At the same time, a growing urban middle class is consuming more higher-value, high-protein foods, which is stoking food price inflation — as well as changing business and farm models in rural India.

The food chain in India is undergoing deep change.

“There is a view that this is a structural shift and pulses, milk, meat, eggs, fish, protein items — these are sectors where you need to concentrate,” Abhijit Sen, who sits on the government’s planning committee, said in a speech on June 5.

Rising middle class

Those shifts have been under way for years but are accelerating with rapid urbanization and the expansion of India’s middle class. India is getting wealthier as well as healthier.

Its eight per cent annual growth, second only to China among major countries, is boosting incomes rapidly in the trillion-dollar economy. Per capita income surged to $1,265 in 2010 from $857 in 2006 — a nearly 50 per cent increase — according to the World Bank and IMF.

Middle-class households are expected to grow 67 per cent in the next five years, bringing over 53 million households into an annual income bracket between 340,000 and 1.7 million rupees ($7,600-$38,000).

Bijay Kumar, managing director of the National Horticulture Board, says having more money than your parents is pushing up demand for high-protein foods.

“Rising income levels are allowing people to spend on high-value stuff,” he says. “People are more aware of health. They are increasing their intake of fruits in their regular diet.”

In 2009-10, Indians boosted spending on fruit and vegetables by nearly nine per cent over the year earlier. They shelled out almost 31 per cent more on meat, eggs and fish. Spending on cereals, on the other hand, was flat.

“A dietary transformation is underway in the country and demand for high-value, vitamin and protein-rich food such as fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, poultry, meat and fish is increasing,” the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said in a study this year.

Food security

Years of eating an oil-rich, sugary diet high in carbohydrates have left many Indians with a paunch and a health problem. India has the world’s largest diabetes population at just below 51 million people, while heart disease is the single-largest cause of death.

Yet hunger is endemic among the country’s 500 million poor. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is drafting a Food Security Act that promises to expand subsidized wheat and rice well beyond the current 30 per cent of the population in a country that is home to 40 per cent of the world’s malnourished children.

That could mean India spending about $25 billion a year on providing cheap food or about nine per cent of total spending this year — more than four times the expenditure on health care.

While the farm sector is slowly diversifying, it is a declining contributor to growth, despite providing a living to more than half the country’s workforce. About 600 million Indians are dependent on farming — half the population of 1.2 billion — even though agriculture makes up only 14.6 per cent of the economy and has been declining from 30 per cent a decade ago.

The average size of farms in India is a mere 1.33 hectares — about the size of two soccer pitches — and that figure has been steadily declining.

Farmers are finding it evermore difficult to make ends meet. The introduction of high-yielding seed varieties and increased use of fertilizers and irrigation spawned the Green Revolution in the 1960s that allowed India to become self-sufficient in grains. But experts say agriculture innovation and efficiency has stalled in recent years and farmers are getting squeezed by rising costs and inefficient agronomy.

Since the mid-1990s, an estimated 150,000 small farmers have committed suicide, according to the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, most of them over debts.

Increasingly, voices in government and among experts are calling for a different approach, one that curbs subsidy spending, tackles inflation and boosts agricultural production of higher-value foods.

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Over the next two years Bangladeshi firms plan to lease a total of 600,000 hectares of unused arable land in African countries including Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique and Liberia, said Wahidur Rahman, a senior Foreign Ministry official, May 19.

Bhati Bangla Agritech was set to sign a deal to hire 30,000 hectares of farmland in Tanzania, while Nitol Group has inked an agreement to lease 10,000 hectares of land in Uganda, he said.

The move would help create jobs for Bangladeshi farmers as well.

The government, battling food price inflation of nearly 14 per cent, is looking at all possible options to ensure security of food supplies for its more than 150 million people.

The disaster-prone South Asian country, once self-sufficient in rice production, has recently become a big importer, which analysts blamed on shrinking farmland due to rapid industrialization and urbanization.

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W damages from yet another spring with too much water.

Cattle producers are worrying about winter feed supplies as they watch flood waters inundate their hayfields.

We are told this year is one for the record books. The fact that excess water has been a growing issue in this province for years, and that it could take years for some of the areas affected by this year’s flooding to recover – if they resurface at all – is a little unnerving for the people whose name is on the deed, the operating line of credit and the mortgage.

Likewise for the politicians – and taxpayers – faced with the cost of compensation.

In the midst of our verdant crisis, a disaster of a different sort is unfolding elsewhere. Officials in Texas say the past eight months have been the driest since precipitation record-keeping began in the 1890s. Cattle producers must sell their herds or watch them starve. China is experiencing both drought and killing floods. Drought is cutting into production in France too, where G20 leaders are gathering to discuss ways of curbing increasingly volatile global food prices.

Whoops, and there go the share prices of one of the big fertilizer suppliers – rising like a hot-air balloon as shareholders prepare to cash in on the latest food crisis.

“Record global crop prices are driving demand for all crop inputs,” Agrium chief executive Mike Wilson said as the company raised its quarterly earnings outlook last week.

An FAO and OECD report cited in a Reuters story last week said world commodity prices will continue to push higher throughout this decade, creating unprecedented pressure on the poor and politicians.

“Commodity prices should fall from the highs of early 2011, but in real terms are projected to average up to 20 per cent higher for cereals (maize) and up to 30 per cent for meats (poultry) over the 2011- 20 period compared to the last decade,” the report said.

World food prices hit a record high earlier this year, triggered mainly by bad weather, reviving memories of soaring prices in 2007-08 that sparked riots in countries such as Egypt, Haiti and Cameroon.

Lurking in the background is the widely cited prediction that food availability will need to increase by up to 70 per cent globally by the middle of this century if it is to keep up with the escalating demand for food.

If we’re not keeping up now, how on earth will we do it then?

So on one end of the spectrum, we have farmers facing climate-induced uncertainty. It’s wonderful to have high prices, but not so much fun if you can’t produce something to sell.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who worry about having enough to eat as their grocery bill spirals beyond what their income allows.

In the middle is an uneasy mix of political, commercial and environmental forces that seem more inclined to clash than co-operate.

G20 leaders are mired in a debate this week over whether to rein in the commodity markets or whether there is some other means of containing volatile and politically destabilizing price swings.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has blamed speculators for food price inflation that has fuelled unrest in North Africa and the Middle East. He’s pushing for tougher commodity-trading rules.

But he has so far failed to win much support. Regulation can have unintended consequences. Postwar food policies in the EU, which were designed to ensure there would never be food shortages in Europe again, were remarkably successful, to the point where the stockpiles of food became burdensome and damaging to prices worldwide.

Other proposals on the table include more sharing of information on stocks of key commodities, information that is closely guarded in countries like China. Or simply pouring more investment into increasing farm output through the use of new technologies.

The trouble with relying on technological fixes is weather. Advanced yield potential is of little use if you can’t get into your fields to plant it, or if it is too cold, too hot or too dry for it to grow properly.

Resolution to the world’s food crisis will come from a combination of political intervention, innovation and of course, technology. But we have to be more creative than focusing solely on increased production through strategies such as reduced waste and improved distribution.

Even though farmers have shown their willingness to increase production, their financial “reward” has been lower prices and higher production costs. It’s a model that works politically, because if supplies rise, food prices don’t. But it’s not a model that is economically or environmentally sustainable over the long term because it presumes farmers are capable of doing the impossible – outsmarting the weather. laura@fbcpublishing.com

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His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly wilder weather is making food production more unpredictable. It’s the new normal they must prepare for.

Bragg’s farm in New South Wales state has been in the family for generations and has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years. After seven years of costly drought, the weather switched last year to unseasonably wet with flooding rains.

“It’s screaming to me that things are getting hotter and drier at different times of the year,” said the 40-year-old Bragg during a recent visit to his property, about two hours’ drive to the west of Canberra, the Australian capital.

“Our summers are getting wetter and if this trend continues, then we will have to find different means of farming,” he said.

RETHINK

Across the globe, rising temperatures and more intense droughts, floods and storms are forcing a rethink in how to grow food, from breeding hardier crop varieties and changing planting times to complete genetic overhauls of plants.

Growing populations, changing diets and insatiable demand for grains, meat and vegetables is putting pressure on global food production and prices like never before.

Soaring food prices, civil unrest and worries about weather have spurred a global race to create more productive crops that can thrive in a warmer – and more prosperous – world.

The World Bank estimates 925 million people are hungry in the world today. The figure has been rising since 1995-97 due to rising food prices, a succession of economic crises, and a neglect of agricultural innovation, especially relevant to the poor.

It is going to get much worse for the hungry because global food prices will more than double within 20 years, aid agency Oxfam International said in a June 1 report. Flatlining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress against hunger, it said.

The challenge is to speed up the creation of new crops more adaptable to climate change and capable of much greater yields. A laboratory in the leafy heart of Canberra could hold some of the answers.

Inside, hundreds of seedlings on a conveyor belt file through a high-tech chamber, each plant bar-coded and scanned for signs of genetic superiority. A selection process that took months in the past, now takes a fraction of the time.

DIGITAL AGRICULTURE

“I call this digital agriculture,” said plant scientist Bob Furbank of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The three-metre high PlantScan chamber uses 3D laser radar and other devices to measure size, growth and water use.

“It’s like the plant Olympics. We have to rapidly pick the best of the best,” Furbank, scientific director of CSIRO’s Plant Phenomics centre in Canberra, said on a recent visit to the laboratory brimming with high-tech equipment after a multimillion-dollar refit.

The centre is part of renewed global efforts to create a new generation of crops that will dramatically boost yields, particularly for wheat and rice.

Investment into creating a new generation of staple crops, especially wheat and rice, has lagged since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which led to years of bumper harvests, easing worries about lack of food.

The new green revolutionaries must find ways of doubling yields as the global population, set to hit seven billion later this year, heads for nine billion by 2050, with greater affluence changing diets and triggering ever-greater demand.

HEAT IS ON

To feed two billion more mouths by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 per cent, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to meeting the target as rising temperatures and droughts dry out farmlands or more intense floods and storms inundate them.

“What we expect in the future is there will be much more unexpected events, much more extreme climate change,” said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO in Rome.

Boosting yields has become almost an obsession with governments, seed companies such as Syngenta and Monsanto, and scientific bodies such as Australia’s CSIRO.

Global yield growth of wheat and rice has stagnated at 0.6 per cent to 0.7 per cent annually over the past 10 years – about half the production growth rate of 1.2 to 1.4 per cent annually needed from now to 2050, the FAO says.

Scientists say they are running out of time to boost yields.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising quickly, the world is already on track to exceed a 2 C threshold that scientists say risks triggering dangerous climate change. The planet has already warmed about 0.8 C on average since 1900.

Unless emissions growth is slammed into hard reverse, the world could be 2 to 3 warmer on average by 2050, and much more by 2100.

Computer climate models show large areas of Australia, Africa, the United States, eastern Brazil and southern Europe drying out in the coming decades. But Russia, Canada and Indochina would become wetter, potentially benefiting crop production or allowing new crops to be grown in previously cooler climes.

Overall, for many major cereal crop-growing regions, the future will hinge on drought and heat-tolerant varieties, better weather forecasts and a likely shift in cropping to new areas.

A U.S. study published last month in the journal Sciencefound climate change was already exerting a considerable drag on the yield growth of crops.

The authors used crop yield models with and without changes in temperature and rainfall to show global falls in wheat output of 5.5 per cent and 3.8 per cent for corn as a result of climate change from 1980-2008.

That was equivalent to the entire annual corn crop of Mexico, or the wheat crop of France, the European Union’s biggest producer, it said.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

The global forecast is for increasingly bad weather, amid spiralling demand from an expanding global middle class.

“Two and one-half billion people entering the world’s middle class is a lot more important than climate change,” said Jeffrey Currie, global head of commodities for Goldman Sachs in London.

The World Bank’s food price index, which measures global prices, jumped 36 per cent in April from a year ago to near its 2008 peak, before dropping again.

“While it might not be the primary cause, it definitely is an underlying cause for some of the instability you’re seeing in North Africa and the Middle East right now,” said Rick Leach, chief executive of the World Food Program USA. “The very poor can spend up to 80 per cent of their income on food,” he said, adding: “We’re now moving into a period of extreme worry in terms of the implications of food price increases.”

More than 680 million people in Asia and the Pacific region live on less than US$1.25 a day, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a UN agency, says.

More than 70 per cent of these are in South Asia – Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan – making the region among the most vulnerable to food price inflation and climate change.

The World Bank in February said rising food prices had pushed an estimated 44 million more people into extreme poverty over the course of eight months, triggering unrest.

That is putting ever-mounting pressure on governments, agronomists and the farm industry to come up with ways of growing more food on less land and under harsher conditions.

“Everything we do in terms of developing our technology, bringing that to growers worldwide, is really about addressing the need to grow more from less,” said Davor Pisk, chief operating officer for Syngenta, the world’s largest agrochemicals firm.

The Swiss firm’s seeds business has flourished, growing to $2.8 billion in 2010, out of total sales of $11.6 billion, in large part for demand for geneti- cally modified (GM) seeds to meet soaring demand in the United States for corn ethanol and for soyoil and soymeal in China.

INVESTMENT

Corn and soy, major elements of animal feed and biofuels, have attracted significant investment for new GM food varieties that have substantially boosted yields. Corn and soybean are also much simpler genetically than wheat and rice.

Syngenta has developed corn and soy varieties that repel pests, fungi and are tolerant to a range of chemicals that kill weeds – all threats expected to get worse during climate change. It has also just released a hybrid called Agrisure Artesian that has resistance to drought.

“What we’re confident of being able to demonstrate is that we can achieve a 15 per cent decline in percentage of losses due to drought. So if you like, we get 15 per cent yield preservation,” Pisk said. The next generation of varieties would aim for 25 per cent.

GM is just one part of a suite of technologies growers need to meet demand and fight the impact of climate change, he said.

The problem is knowing just what sort of future lies ahead for farmers and exactly what varieties were needed for different growing areas.

Computer climate models have become quite good at showing how temperatures will change across the globe, but are less precise on how rainfall and storm patterns will change, particularly at local levels.

SEARCH FOR BETTER YIELDS

If you can’t predict the weather then you can try to beat it – with new genetic strains of grain plants that will boost yields.

But crop yields would have to rise a lot faster than they have been. Scientists say yields will have to increase by around 1.5 per cent a year to match the growth in the world’s population of around one per cent a year. That may sound small, but the current pace of yield growth is well below that.

Overall, rice yields have more than doubled over the past half-century from 1.85 tonnes per hectare in 1960 to 4.29 tonnes in 2011-12, USDA data shows.

But the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines says rice yields will have to rise another 11 per cent to about 4.8 tonnes per ha by 2018-19 just to keep rice prices steady.

By comparison, corn yields have risen from 1.95 tonnes per ha in 1960 to 5.22 tonnes in 2011-12, propelled by soaring demand for animal feed and ethanol. Wheat yields have gained more modestly to three tonnes in 2011-12 from 1.15 tonnes in 1960.

The production of rice, the staple for more than half the world’s population, has kept pace so far with consumption, thanks to advances made in the Green Revolution. But yields will have to keep rising and stocks kept at healthy levels to avoid the kind of panic purchases by governments and export restrictions that helped drive the food price crisis of 2008.

The danger is that climate change could cause yields to drop, in some cases dramatically so, according to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

MODELS FOR CHANGE

Its modelling of the impact of climate change on cereal crops showed yields in 2050 are likely to be lower than they were in 2000, with the most vulnerable being wheat.

But developing a new variety of higher-yielding wheat takes a minimum of seven to 10 years, mostly because it has highly complex genetics. It’s one reason why wheat, and to a similar extent rice, have fallen behind in yield growth and investment.

“In breeding new varieties for use in 20 years’ time, we need to have the necessary genes now. And I think that’s going to be tricky,” said Greg Rebetzke, a wheat breeder for CSIRO in Canberra.

One trick is to boost the early growth of wheat plants. The dwarfing genes that triggered the Green Revolution cut the height of wheat plants and allowed the plant to focus on filling the grain head.

But the shoot that emerges from the seed is too short, limiting planting depth and access to water deeper in the soil. Rebetzke said CSIRO has found “alternative dwarfing genes” with no negative effects on early growth, which are “a major thrust in our breeding effort.”

FUTURE RICE PLANT

To the north of London, the world’s oldest agricultural research station is working on ways to boost British wheat potential yields to 20 or even 25 tonnes in the long term, far above the eight tonnes produced there now.

The 1.6-ha Broadbalk field on Rothamsted farm dates back to 1843 when its founder, John Bennet Lawes, decided to test the power of artificial fertilizers. He had built the world’s first fertilizer factory a year earlier.

Walking in the same field where those trials started, project team leader Martin Parry explained how his team at Rothamsted and in the United States was looking at ways to supercharge photosynthesis in wheat by doubling the amount of CO2 inside the plant.

Parry, like many agronomists, believes a new global effort akin to what happened in the 1970s is needed to feed the world, beyond the promise of technology.

“We’re going to have to do it much more effectively. We’re going to have to use our resources like fertilizer much more efficiently and we’ll have to do it with less land,” he said.

Developing countries will be a big focus in those efforts.

According to the USDA, yields for major crops, including corn, wheat, soybean and rice, are more than 40 per cent lower in developing nations than rich nations, highlighting the paradox that production is lowest where demand is greatest.

BREAKTHROUGH

The biggest breakthrough on the yields front could come in creating a new type of rice plant, the staple for many countries in the developing world.

“We expect the weather conditions and temperature to be more severe in the coming years,” said IRRI director general Robert Zeigler during a recent open day at the institute, near Manila.

“That’s why we need to develop more rice varieties that can tolerate flooding, drought, higher temperature, and can also tolerate salt water,” he said as farmers chatted with scientists at the institute to learn about new varieties.

IRRI has already released commercial varieties that are drought and flood tolerant, limiting losses during bad weather.

Saltwater tolerance will also be crucial as seas rise and more powerful storms push seawater farther into fertile river deltas, such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and large areas of coastal Bangladesh. Faster-growing varieties can also help farmers get in a crop before the typhoon season starts.

IRRI, the CSIRO, as well as researchers in Britain and elsewhere are working on creating supercharged rice to try to double yields, by boosting the rate of photosynthesis.

The project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, could take 20 years, said CSIRO’s Furbank, but will also lead to new ways to ramp up wheat yields as well.

Crucial as well to bridging the yield gap is better agronomy, or farm management practices.

Syngenta has developed a way to boost rice yields in India by an average of 30 per cent as well as cutting labour. Its Tegra system uses seeds coated with an insecticide, mechanical planting of seedlings and training for farmers.

That can make a huge difference in a country of 1.2 billion people where two-thirds of the population are employed by the farm sector and where a failed monsoon can send shock waves through international markets.

“It should be an agronomy revolution,” Calpe, the FAO economist said. “This has been missing tremendously in a lot of countries.”

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“The food system is pretty well bust in the world,” Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

“All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up,” Stocking said.

Hunger was worsening due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change.

“Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,” Oxfam said in a report.

Entitled “Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World,” the report said: “The scale of the challenge is unprecedented, but so is the prize: a sustainable future in which everyone has enough to eat.”

Oxfam believes one way to tame food price inflation is to limit speculation in agricultural commodity futures markets. It also opposed support for using food as the feedstock for biofuels.

The report said: “The vast imbalance in public investment in agriculture must be righted, redirecting the billions now being plowed into unsustainable industrial farming in rich countries towards meeting the needs of small-scale food producers in developing countries.”

The report said the failure of the food system flowed from failures of government to regulate and to invest, which meant that companies, interest groups and elites had been able to plunder resources.

“Now the major powers, the old and the new, must co-operate, not compete, to share resources, build resilience, and tackle climate change,” it said.

“The economic crisis means that we have moved decisively beyond the era of the G8, when a few rich-country governments tried to craft global solutions by and for themselves.”

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But some experts hope that the arrival of giant Cyclone Yasi on the coast of Queensland, already hit by massive floods last month, will help bring more of a sense of urgency to the political debate over climate policy.

Environmental ists have despaired that one of the world’s highest per capita carbon polluters will ever embrace the need to cut emissions, given that most politicians and voters have not made a strong connection with disasters and man-made global warming.

They say they are baffled why weather-beaten Australians are not pushing for stronger policies to cut carbon emissions from power stations, mines, transport and refineries.

“If you want a picture of what a hostile and costly environment looks like, we’ve had it in spades over the past couple of years,” said John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute think-tank.

“Most of our politicians and most of our major media outlets have been extremely hesitant in drawing any connection,” he told Reuters, referring to a climate change link.

“It’s a toxic blend of denial, media management and sheer lack of leadership,” he added.

The government has pledged to put a price on carbon emissions this year as a key pillar of its climate change fight after failing to get sweeping emissions trading legislation through parliament and nearly losing elections in 2010.

At the heart of the issue is that emissions trading would affect all sectors of the economy through higher fuel and power prices. The government has rowed back by reviewing the issue, without saying how carbon emissions will be priced.

“It’s right to price carbon, the most economically efficient way of reducing pollution,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a speech on Tuesday.

A few days earlier in a radio interview, Gillard said she recognized that climate change was real but did not want to connect it with the recent floods.

“I don’t think you can look at one, a bit of the weather and say that equals climate change. I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”

PRICE CARBON

Australia has looked at trying to price carbon for over a decade but has faced fiercely opposing views, with lobbying from miners fearing higher costs and opposition scare campaigns over higher taxes and job losses.

Connor thought the recent floods and Cyclone Yasi could be a game changer by putting more pressure on the government to beef up its climate policies.

“People may look afresh at this once we’re through managing the emergency and added up the costs,” he said.

The Australian Greens, which give key support to the ruling Labor party, believe Australians would be willing to pay for steps to fight greenhouse gas emissions and want an initial carbon price followed by an emissions trading scheme.

IT’S NOT ALL CLIMATE CHANGE

Veteran climate scientist Neville Nicholls said a possible reason for lack of public action was the tendency for some people to try to link all Australian extreme weather and climate events to climate change.

“When a climate extreme of the opposite variety comes along, this makes it easy for those who want to pretend that it is all just natural climate variability to paint all climate science as ‘alarmist,’” said Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne.

Since 2006, Australia has suffered a string of disasters that have costs hundreds of lives, caused losses in the billions and disrupted the crucial agriculture and mining sectors.

In March 2006, Cyclone Larry tore through the northern Queensland town of Innisfail, causing an estimated A$1.5 billion in damage to the area.

A combination of drought and a record-breaking heat wave February 2009 triggered the nation’s deadliest fires around the southern city of Melbourne that killed 173 people and A$1 billion in insurance losses. Severe storms in Perth and Melbourne last year also caused losses of about A$1 billion.

WEATHER EXTREMES

Floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria since December have killed 35 people and become the nation’s costliest natural disaster, swamping 30,000 homes and crippling Queensland’s coal industry.

Australians were already paying for weather extremes through food price inflation and higher insurance premiums.

“The insurance industry knows the damage bill from these events is already on the rise,” said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“So we can’t just continue to mop up without thinking about how fossil fuel emissions are changing our climate,” he added.

———

“It’satoxicblendofdenial,mediamanagementandsheerlackofleadership.”

– JOHN CONNOR

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Unprecedented demonstrations have erupted around the region, triggered by events last month in Tunisia where President Zine al- Abidine Ben Ali was forced into exile in Saudi Arabia by a population provoked by high unemployment and unaffordable food.

On Feb. 1 more than 200,000 Egyptians crammed into the main square in Cairo, answering the call for a million people to make their voices heard against the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, as discontent over years of authoritarian rule exploded into demands for regime change.

Food costs are among the grievances of demonstrators around the region as global food prices hit record highs in December, above levels that prompted riots in 2008, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which warned prices of cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar are set to climb.

Arab attention is keenly focused on Egypt, as wheat prices, already up on supply shortages caused by drought in Russia and floods in Australia, continue to climb to multi-year highs on futures markets closely watching unrest in the region.

“The government has to take care, monitor prices and improve salaries so that they avoid what happened in Tunisia and spread to Algeria and Cairo,” said Raeda al-Farooki, a mother of four, at a large supermarket in Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.

“Onions were about five riyals ($1.3) per kilo two years ago and now are around 10. Imported food is even more expensive, but the worst part is that there is no increase in salaries,” said Farooki, who lives on 6,000 riyals ($1,600) per month.

Algeria, Libya and Jordan have either relaxed food taxes or duties on food imports or cut prices of staple food, and Kuwait recently introduced a generous stipend and free food for its citizens until March 2012 to ease the pain of higher costs.

There is also simmering unrest in Yemen, the poorest Arab country, where 40 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 per day.

MORE TO COME

At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders warned that soaring food prices could trigger more unrest and even war.

“Imagine the pressure on food, energy, water and resources,” Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in a speech at Davos. “The next economic war or conflict can be over the race for scarce resources, if we don’t manage it together.”

A fast-rising young population and rising unemployment may raise social pressures in Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil exporter has more trouble distributing its oil wealth among 18.5 million locals unlike other Gulf governments, though street protests are unlikely.

To provide work and diversify its economy from oil, Saudi Arabia is in the third year of a $400-billion five-year program, but spending has to be managed carefully to avoid adding to inflation.

“In 2011, we expect on average (global) food and beverage prices to go up substantially by almost 20 per cent,” Ayesha Sabavala, economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said.

“I see some risk of this food price inflation in terms of some anger against the government in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But nothing to the extent of Tunisia,” she said.

Gulf inflation is projected to be between 2.8 and 5.0 per cent this year.

Saudi Arabia’s central bank governor has already expressed concern over inflation in the desert kingdom, which much like its neighbours imports around 70 per cent of its food needs.

Growing oil receipts allow rulers of oil-exporting countries to pay hundreds millions of dollars in subsidies from fuel to housing for the local population, although some such as the United Arab Emirates have started to cut back.

“They are too flabby to go to the streets. There are no shortages of food, there is abundance of food, it is abundance of almost everything else,” said Sami al-Faraj, head of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies.

“A citizen in Gulf states is not just given a fantastic welfare state system but somehow he is or she is pampered to not know limitations,” he said.

In Kuwait, which saw the steepest annual food price rise in the Gulf last year at 8.5 per cent, its emir ordered the distribution of $4 billion in cash and free essential food.

Morocco’s government, which heavily subsidizes food and gas, has vowed to keep food prices at affordable levels “at any price” for its population of 32 million.

BUYING UP FARMS

Growing more food locally is not a viable option for countries in the world’s top oil-exporting region, with extreme summer temperatures that can top 50 C (122 F) and limited access to water.

Investing for the longer term, they are leasing and buying farmland in developing nations to cut the swelling food import bill.

“Subsidies is one way over the short term but they all have to think how they can be effective in investing abroad in various agricultural-producing countries,” said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi.

Hassad Food, owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund – a top global investor – has been in talks with governments in Argentina and Ukraine to buy farmland for cereals production.

But investing in farmland abroad is not without its critics who accuse buyers of perpetrating a “land grab” that could reduce access to food for some of the world’s poorest people.

In Saudi Arabia, where food accounts for a quarter of household costs – more than anywhere else in the region, the government is boosting wheat reserves to cover its needs for a year instead of six months.

“The inflation is burning a bigger hole in my pocket as my salary has not increased for the last two years,” said Kassim al- Falahi, an Omani government employee. “With three kids and parents to look after, it is tough to keep up with rising prices of food.”

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“It went through with no problem,” one source told Reuters on condition of anonymity after a meeting of the EU’s anti-dumping committee of 27 national trade diplomats.

From March 13, U. S. firms exporting biodiesel into the EU will have to pay additional tariffs for an initial six months, ranging from 26 euros ($32.88) to 41 euros per 100 kg.

Also per 100 kg, Archer Daniels Midland will face duties of 26 euros, Cargill 27 euros, Imperium Renewables 29 euros, Green Earth Energy Fuels 28 euros and World Energy Alternatives 29 euros.

Peter Cremer North America and most other U. S. biodiesel companies exporting to Europe will pay 41 euros per 100 kg.

The duties remain for up to six months. The executive European Commission must then decide whether to propose “definitive” duties, which normally last five years. Definitive duties must be approved by EU governments to enter into force.

The move is the latest in a series of transatlantic trade spats dogging EU-U. S. relations, with Brussels and Washington at loggerheads over an EU ban on imports of U. S. chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef.

The EU has expressed dissatisfaction with the inclusion of a so-called “Buy American” clause in a U. S. stimulus plan as the Group of 20 industrial and emerging economies pledged to avoid protectionist measures to deal with the global economic crisis.

Brussels began a probe into the imports last year following a complaint from EU producers of biodiesel – by far the main biofuel produced in Europe – who said they were being hammered by U. S. subsidies.

Such subsidies distort the growing international trade in plant-based fuels, the EU producers said.

“If … these duties will be imposed, then this proves our complaint was well founded,” Raffaello Garofalo, secretary general of the European Biodiesel Board, told Reuters.

“This will re-establish a level playing field and put an end to unacceptable and artificial prices created by U. S. biodiesel producers.”

MARKET RESTRUCTURING

Traders said they expected biodiesel prices in Europe to firm on the news.

“The industry will certainly start restructuring itself in the short term to medium term with one eye on the possibility that the duties could be imposed permanently,” one broker said.

Imports from the United States into Europe are larger than from any other country and increased from about 7,000 tonnes in 2005 to more than 1.5 million tonnes last year.

The U. S. government under then-president George W. Bush and U. S. biodiesel industry had called the European complaint a “protectionist ploy.”

The United States Trade Representative’s office said it had no immediate comment.

EU producers are particularly unhappy with subsidies for so-called B99 – biodiesel with small amounts of mineral diesel – that they said were distorting global trade rules.

The EU firms say exporters in the United States are involved in so-called “splash and dash,” whereby they import cheaper biodiesel from countries such as Brazil and add less than five per cent of U. S. mineral diesel so they can pick up the subsidy from Washington before exporting to Europe.

The EU has long encouraged the production of so-called “green” biofuels – once hailed as a way of reducing the world’s reliance on crude oil and slowing climate change.

Many scientists and environmental groups contend that their production has contributed to food price inflation, depleted rainforests and failed to save substantial greenhouse gas emissions.

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Chief economist Joe Glauber said at a conference sponsored by Farm Journal magazine that grain and soybean prices would remain volatile because of tight supplies.

Food price inflation, now the highest in two decades, should rise at a slower rate in 2009, an effect of the fall-off in market prices since the summer. He said food prices might rise four to 4.5 per cent in 2009.

“We may see a bit of a drop there,” Glauber said in discussing wheat plantings. He said wheat plantings would fall due to competition from corn and soybeans. Soybean sowings would be stable next year, he said.

Corn plantings “should be closer to 90 million acres next year,” said Glauber, due to comparatively small stockpiles and rising demand for ethanol, now made mostly from corn.

For 2008 harvest, growers planted 63 million acres of wheat, 85.9 million acres of corn and 75.9 million acres of soybeans.

USDA will report on winter wheat plantings in early January and make its first projections of spring plantings in late February.

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