Day: October 18, 2022

The federal government announced Tuesday a program that will provide $1.3 billion in debt relief for about 36,000 farmers who have fallen behind on loan payments or face foreclosure.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the farm loan relief program funded from $3.1 billion set aside in the Inflation Reduction Act allocated toward assisting distressed borrowers of direct or guaranteed loans administered by USDA. The law was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in August.

The USDA provides loans to about 115,000 farmers and livestock producers who cannot obtain commercial credit. Those who have missed payments, are in foreclosure or are heading toward default will get help from the USDA. Financial difficulties for farmers may be caused by a variety of issues including drought and transportation bottlenecks.

“Through no fault of their own, our nation’s farmers and ranchers have faced incredibly tough circumstances over the last few years,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “The funding included in today’s announcement helps keep our farmers farming and provides a fresh start for producers in challenging positions.”

About 11,000 farm borrowers who are delinquent on direct or guaranteed loan payments for 60 days or longer are receiving automatic electronic payments to get them current on their loans.

Each farmer with a direct loan received about $52,000 and those with guaranteed loans received about $172,000. The total cost for this group is nearly $600 million. Farmers who received this help will get a letter informing them that their payments have been made and they will remain current until their next annual payment is due in 2023, Vilsack said.

Another $200 million has been used to immediately help 2,100 farm borrowers after their loans had been foreclosed but who still owed money and had their tax refunds and other resources taken by the U.S. Treasury. The money will be used to pay the money these farmers owe to give them a fresh start, Vilsack said. The USDA said farmers in this category received an average of $101,000.

Another $571 million will be used to help several additional groups including:

— 7,000 farmers who during the COVID pandemic delayed loan payments to the end of their loans. This will cost $66 million.

— 1,600 farmers that face bankruptcy or foreclosure will get help on a case-by-case basis with individual meetings to assess their problem and find solutions at a cost of $330 million.

— 14,000 financially distressed farm borrowers facing cash flow problems who ask for help to avoid missing a loan payment will receive additional assistance. Vilsack said these issues could be brought on by drought or by low water levels on the Mississippi River, which is slowing barge traffic and causing grain transportation issues. Up to $175 million will be available for this program.

The money announced Tuesday is the first round of payments designed to help ensure the farmers stay in business or re-enter farming.

The remainder of the $3.1 billion will be used to help relax unnecessary loan restrictions and provide further assistance to be announced later, the USDA said.

Farmers assisted by the program have been found by the USDA to be distressed borrowers hard hit by pandemic-induced market disruptions exacerbated by more frequent, more intense, climate-driven natural disasters, the USDA said.

Biden and his administration continue to endure criticism for enacting a program to forgive some college loans but some of the Republican politicians who have criticized that program did not respond to questions about whether they support the farm loan help.

The USDA also provided $31 billion to help nearly a million farmers offset lower sales, prices and other losses because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 and 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has said.

Source: Voice of America

Nearly a decade ago, farmers in India began growing a staple grain that was fortified with iron and zinc to address a longstanding health problem – anemia among women and children. Since 2018, its cultivation is also expanding in Africa.

Now millions of people consume the grain, helping ward off malnutrition that results, not only from how much people eat, but what they eat.

Pearl millet has long made up the bulk of diets of rural communities in drought-prone regions of India and Africa. But while the grain fills stomachs, it lacks crucial vitamins and minerals resulting in what is called “hidden hunger” among people who cannot afford balanced diets.

Mahalingam Govindaraj, an agricultural scientist based in Hyderabad city, told VOA it took nearly a decade of research to develop the biofortified pearl millet. He will be awarded the 2022 Norman E. Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application on October 19 by the World Food Prize Foundation for his “outstanding leadership in mainstreaming biofortified crops, particularly pearl millet, in India and Africa.”

Govindaraj is a senior scientist with Washington-based HarvestPlus, the Alliance of Biodiversity International, and The International Center for Tropical Agriculture, that have focused on fortifying staple crops with vitamins and minerals to address micronutrient deficiency.

The son of a farmer, Govindaraj was the first in his family to graduate from college and was excited to learn what impact science could have on agriculture. The biofortification of staple crops had emerged on the horizon and he began work on millets. “It was an emotional choice for me because before my father switched to rice, my family used to grow millets,” he recalled. “The idea is not to replace what is traditionally eaten, but to make it more nutritious.”

Packed With Iron

Pearl millet is a hardy grain grown widely in arid regions of India and Africa. Govindaraj’s farming background equipped him to know exactly what farmers would want. “We had to ensure that its maturity period should be short, it should be a high yielding variety and the grain color should be good, because otherwise they would not grow it,” he said.

Iron-enriched pearl millet seeds, called “Dhanashakti,” were first given to farmers in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Initially, seed companies used vans with loudspeakers in villages to popularize it.

Now, about 120,000 Indian farmers grow the grain known as “bajra” across India’s central and southern regions. By 2024, an estimated nine million people will eat a traditional flatbread called “roti” made with this grain.

Its benefits: 200 grams of this grain provide women with about 80 percent of their recommended daily allowance of iron, thus providing a cheap source of the micronutrient in a country where nearly 60 percent of the children below five and over half the pregnant women are anemic.

In the last four years, farmers in the drought-prone areas of the Sahelian zone of West Africa in countries like Niger and Senegal have also begin growing iron biofortified pearl millet known as “Chakti.”

“Biofortification is gaining momentum because it can ensure better nutrition to the coming generation and is cost effective,” points out Monika Garg at the National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute in Mohali, India. “If nutrients are added to the crop itself, it reaches the masses easily and is cheaper. While giving artificial supplements is possible, it is far harder to reach the rural poor with these interventions.”

Grain Addresses “Hidden Hunger”

The benefits of the fortified pearl millet are already evident. A study by Britain-based BMC Public Health in India’s Maharashtra state showed that a diet of iron-rich pearl millet given to a group of adolescents for six months reversed iron deficiency and also improved memory, attention and physical activity levels.

The scale of “hidden hunger” is huge – an estimated two billion people, or nearly one in four persons, suffer from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies, according to the World Health Organization.

Govindaraj points out that the benefits of biofortified crops were also highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic when tens of thousands of people grappled with reduced food portions because they lost incomes. There are also concerns that climate change and food inflation as a result of the Ukraine conflict are exacerbating malnutrition.

In recent years biofortification of key food crops to tackle malnutrition has emerged firmly on the radar of India and many other developing countries.

In India, several government agricultural institutes are working on it. Besides pearl millet, crops such as wheat and rice have also been fortified with micronutrients.

The next challenge is to mainstream those biofortified crops by ensuring that all farmers plant seeds containing micronutrients. The Indian government has already stipulated minimum standards of zinc and iron that all varieties of pearl millet should contain.

“This is a major milestone,” says Govindaraj. “A beginning has been made and as its cultivation gets scaled up over the next five or six years, it will ensure that every person consuming pearl millet gets micronutrients along with their energy needs.”

Source: Voice of America