Even as war wages around them, Syrian farmers keep country fed

Prices are higher, but there remains enough food grown within 
the war-ravaged country to stave off food shortages

For the past six months, farmer Hisham al-Zeir’s wife and daughters have been up before sunset each day when it’s still cool, baking traditional tanoor bread in a century-old clay oven in their home in Syria’s rich agricultural province of Idlib. Rather than selling all his wheat to the state as he usually does, Zeir


Syria needs to import more grain milan / reuters / Syria, hit by a civil unrest, needs to raise cereals import by about a third in the current marketing year after its local grain output 10 per cent dropped in 2011, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said March 14. “Continued civil unrest

PepsiCo Partnership To Boost Ethiopian Chickpeas

PepsiCo Inc., best known for its cola and Lays potato chips, is now setting its sights on chickpeas. The company is teaming up with the U.S. Agency for International Development to boost the production of chickpeas in Ethiopia by working with small farmers. The plan is then to help develop local businesses that use the


Think-Tank Creates Food Price-Volatility Detector

Anew statistical tool will help world leaders identify when food prices become dangerously volatile and help hunger fighters decide when to release food reserves to feed the poor, said a think-tank July 7. The tool developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) could answer two goals of agriculture ministers from the Group of

Scientists Race To Avoid A Bitter Climate Change Harvest

Charlie Bragg gazes across his lush fields where fat lambs are grazing, his reservoirs filled with water, and issues a sigh of relief. Things are normal this year and that’s a bit unusual of late. His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly


More Than Six Million Need Food Aid In N. Korea

More than six million people in North Korea urgently need food aid because of substantial falls in domestic production, food imports and international aid, the United Nations said May 25. In a report providing a rare glimpse into the reclusive communist state, where a famine in the 1990s killed an estimated one million people, three

Zimbabwe Lacks Funds To Transport Food Aid Minister

Zimbabwe does not have the money to transport food aid to areas experiencing acute shortages, Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said on March 21. The country wants to send its entire 270,000 tonnes of grain reserves to provinces that are worst hit by drought and where 1.7 million people need aid, but the Grain Marketing Board


In Brief… – for Mar. 17, 2011

Terminal deal:Richardson International Limited said March 10 it has agreed to buy the North East Terminal grain-handling facility in Wadena, Saskatchewan. The $25-million deal, which also includes crop input facilities at Wadena, Kelvington, Foam Lake and Ponass Lake, Saskatchewan, is expected to close on April 13. The sale hinges on approval by North East shareholders,

Chronic Food Deficit In N. Korea — UN

Impoverished North Korea faces a chronic food shortage following a harsh winter which has affected its harvest, a United Nations official said March 11. Years of mismanaged farm policy and natural disasters in the 1990s resulted in famine that some estimates said killed as many as a million people. “We know that they have had