What's New

The August edition of the FAO Monthly News Report on Grains was released today. The report covers ongoing global and regional trends in grain prices and policies. This month's edition covers bumper grain crops in China, the impact of imported European feed wheat on Asian corn markets, and declining production in Ukraine.

The FAO Monthly News Report on Grains series provides a collection of news articles from international media and news sources on issues relating to the international grain economy. These reports also include statistics and upcoming events.

Global and regional experts will meet in El Salvador on September 10-11 to discuss new ways to enhance food and nutrition security in Central America.

Ensuring that small-scale farmers and producers enjoy a bigger piece of the financial pie is the aim of a new web resource on agricultural development.

The Value Chains Knowledge Clearinghouse , led by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets , is based on the concept of Value Chains Development (VCD). The approach seeks to build new or strengthen existing commercial ties between two or more actors, such as businesses and consumers. Several NGOs, donors, and governments have adopted VCD as a key element of their rural poverty reduction strategies.

At the L’Aquila G-8 summit in 2009, governments and organizations committed more than $20 billion to agriculture and rural development as a means of promoting food and nutrition security.

Within the overarching frameworks of the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative (AFSI), the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the Accra Agenda for Action, Ghana also committed to improving aid accountability and development effectiveness via “demand-driven development cooperation” and a “donor-coordinated approach.”

With the recent passage of both the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Union and the Farm Bill in the United States, the EU and US are headed down “divergent paths” in the way their agricultural policies support their own farmers. Nevertheless, both policies feature large public expenditures towards farm subsidies. What type of impact will these policies have on international food security and production and public costs in the US and EU and how will they address the major global food security challenges of the 21st century?