JOHANNESBURG, 29 August 2008 (IRIN) - A US$500,000 project by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is using Madagascar's agricultural off-season to decrease food aid dependency and offset the effects of high food prices.

The FAO launched an emergency Technical Cooperation Project in July to provide rice seed, bean seed and fertilisers to about 6,000 farmers and their families, targeting households hit hard by the recent cyclones that destroyed 80 percent of the last harvest, when people consumed seed supplies as food.

"Every year, Madagascar imports about 200,000 tonnes of rice for consumption; this year, the gap is estimated at 270,000 tonnes, and that will present a challenge," Marco Falcone, FAO's Emergency Coordinator in Madagascar, said in a statement.

Farmers in Madagascar traditionally plant crops in the main rainy season, which starts in November, but by utilising the off-season in July and August, food production could be considerably increased.

"Importing rice at international prices means paying 70 percent more than current local prices, and that isn't expected to change," Falcone said.

Boosting the rice harvest means expanding irrigation schemes and ensuring the regular use of fertilisers to plant unused arable land, allowing cultivation outside of the country's traditional planting timeframes.

Development partners, including the World Bank, are supporting the Malagasy government in its aims to boost annual production by up to 500,000 tonnes of paddy rice per year in three years' time. Current national production is about 3.5 million tonnes of paddy rice annually, and any surplus beyond domestic needs could be sold.

"Madagascar could be more than self-sufficient in rice," Falcone said. "Madagascar stands to benefit as a major exporter to the Indian Ocean islands of Comoros, Seychelles and Mauritius, for example. Countries in eastern and southern Africa could be another major export market."

Diversified diet

Falcone said the FAO recognised that increasing rice production was not the panacea to Madagascar's malnutrition and chronic poverty, where UNAIDS estimates that 85 percent of the country's about 18 million people live on US$2 or less a day.

"Malnourishment in Madagascar is aggravated by people's dependence on just one food – rice – which provides calories but not many nutrients or protein," he commented.

To counter the tendency towards a single-food diet, support provided by FAO, USAID and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) this year has led to the production of sorghum in the island's dry south.

"This is the first significant sorghum harvest the south has had in nearly 20 years," said Tom Osborn, Agricultural Officer for the FAO's Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service.

"Sorghum disappeared as a main food crop in the mid-1990s, when both crops and seeds were consumed in famine years for survival. Quality sorghum seed was no longer available in southern Madagascar, and then sorghum was largely replaced by maize," Osborn said.

Maize is not viewed as a suitable crop for production in the south because of the arid conditions, so FAO has reintroduced sorghum and short-cycle maize, which, with the shorter growing period, is less vulnerable to dry spells.

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