It's two breeding cycles for maize.

Like everyone else, we grew maize.

The price of maize, half of which is imported from the US, more than doubled in a year, primarily because of production of bio ethanol. Mexico tried to solve the problem by imposing a state administered price ceiling for maize tortillas, combined with duty free maize imports.

The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize.

Annual maize production, the basic staple, is one third of what it was several years ago.

To give you an example, between 2001 and 2002, Ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest.

By 2030, if the maize, or corn, varieties, which is the dominant crop 50 percent of the nutrition in Southern Africa are still in the field in 2030, we'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030.

The main subsistence crops are manioc, millet, sorghum, maize, potatoes, taros, plantains, yams, peanuts, rice, marrow, pulses and sesame.

In Ethiopia, for example, the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually.

Besides commercial fertilizers and food waste, biogas plants increasingly process energy crops such as cereals, maize (whole plants) and grass.

The next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock, the maize, the wheat and the soya.

That in turn, because of the weak marketing system, led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country.

Ethiopia's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than South Africa's grain production, and, in fact, Ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in Africa.

Some stoves use dust or residues from processed rice, maize and other crops or from sawdust. These stoves are more economical than the traditional charcoal stoves

This situation results in scarcity of fuelwood and charcoal and pushes many farmers to use elementary forms of energy sources such as cow dung and maize stoves

I don't say let's go back to the Copper Canyons and live on corn and maize, which is the Tarahumara's preferred diet, but maybe there's somewhere in between.

Furthermore, as rice is the preferred staple for Koreans, food insecure families can barter their rice rations for larger quantities of maize less popular staple and thus obtain more food for the family.

Far from being under regulated, GM plants (and other organisms) have been subjected to expensive, discriminatory, and unscientific over regulation that has limited the commercial success of maize, cotton, canola, soybeans, and papaya, among other crops.

Bioethanol, which can be made from processing maize, sugar cane and beet, wheat, potatoes and a variety of other starch and sugar crops, is widely used in Brazil, the United States of America and parts of Europe.

COPENHAGEN As the world continues to debate the impact of climate change while seeking a new global treaty to prevent it, Kenya has endured a prolonged drought followed by heavy flooding. Maize plants have withered, hitting poor rural families hard.

Some of the activities have included the replication of rice seed multiplication trials, which have produced over a 300 per cent yield in select districts, and reducing 95 per cent of the post harvest losses for maize at the household levels.

However, a study by the South African Government concluded that by producing fuels from soybeans on a commercial basis, the country would be able to produce significantly more food in the form of protein rich soy oilcake and maize at the same time.

Similarly, in Nairobi, Miringo Kinyanjui, another woman entrepreneur, is supplying unrefined and more nutritious maize and wheat flour. In another move to distinguish her ingredients from Western versions, Kinyanjui also sells through grocery stores flour flavored with Amarathan, a green vegetable that grows around Kenya.

Peasant farmers in Africa, Haiti, and other impoverished regions currently plant their crops without the benefit of high yield seed varieties and fertilizers. The result is a grain yield (for example, maize) that is roughly one third less than what could be achieved with better farm inputs.

There is hope next year, the Kenyan authorities will begin testing maize varieties that they hope will provide high yields and prove more resistant to drought. But why did farmers in Kenya and other African countries not have access to drought resistant crop varieties before catastrophe struck?

This investment pays off wonderfully, with research centers such as the International Rice Research Institute and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre providing the high yield seeds and innovative farming strategies that together triggered the Asian Green Revolution. These centers are not household names, but they deserve to be.

The substitution of forests by maize, rape, and other oilseed cultivation reduces the stock of biomass and likewise leads to an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Brazil has cleared huge areas of its jungle in order to produce the bio ethanol that impressed the Secretary General.

Similarly, in India s Rajasthan state, high quality complementary foods produced by decentralized women s self help groups are improving the nutrition of children aged 6 36 months. In Ghana, a new instant maize based product, enriched with vitamins and minerals, is the first of its kind on the market, owing to its affordability and natural integration with breastfeeding.

Today, the US turns 40 of its maize output into ethanol to be burned in cars. This has driven up food prices and caused tens of millions of people to starve, while costing more than 17 billion each year in subsidies and causing agricultural deforestation elsewhere in the world, with more total CO2 emissions than the entire savings from the ethanol.

Unfortunately, Kenya s government listened and did not permit their farmers to grow genetically modified (GM) maize, even though it has been approved, sown, harvested, and eaten by both humans and animals in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and other countries for many years. Although Kenya has a well functioning and well funded agricultural research system, the government has not even permitted field tests of GM crop varieties.

If you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants, but also the food that people feed to livestock, the maize, the soy, the wheat, that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products, what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself.