The FAO said on Wednesday that world tea production continued to grow in 2006. The annual growth rate was more than 3 % to reach an estimated 3.6 million tonnes. The expansion was mainly due to record crops in China, Viet Nam and India. The very latest figures put world black tea production at 2.5 million tonnes as compared to 968 000 tonnes for green tea. FAO projections to 2017 indicate that world green tea production is expected to grow at a considerably faster rate than black tea, 4.5 % annually compared to 1.9 % for black tea. The projections reflect the growth in China where the programme for production expansion through rehabilitation, replanting and some conversion is expected to continue to 2017. The level of world tea consumption in 2006 was roughly equal to production. But its growth rate was only one percent, a slowdown from the annual average of 2.7 % growth over the previous decade. Per capita consumption in the major tea producing countries lags behind, in spite of their strong economic growth. Russians consume 1.26 kg per year and the British 2.2 kg per year (the Irish consumption is likely at the same level) but in India tea consumption is only 0.65 kg per head per year and in China it is only 0.53 kg per year.

Global Food Crisis: Soaring global food prices that have severely hit developing countries, which are not big cash commodity producers, may be peaking.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Food Price Index, regarded as the best measure of global food inflation, saw its first decline in 15 months in April, as wheat, dairy, sugar and soyabean prices fell.

José María Sumpsi, the FAO’s Assistant Director-General, told the Financial Times earlier this week that with the exception of corn and rice, food inflation appeared to be “reaching its peak”, although he did not expect prices to start falling.

The FAO index for April, to be published later this month, fell to 216.7 points, down from a revised 217 points in March, after rising 52 per cent in the past 12 months.

The last time the FAO food index posted a monthly drop was in January 2007. However, prices subsequently continued upward. Some prices will stop rising or even fall as farmers plant more crops to take advantage of record prices amid better weather than last year.

The world has "never been less secure" about the near-term future of wheat as crop failures and disease combine to threaten food supplies, US Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer told food aid groups last month. The US is the world's biggest food exporter.

Schafer told a International Food Aid Conference meeting, that crop failures have left global wheat stocks at their lowest point in 30 years and US wheat stocks are at 60-year lows. Climate changes that have spawned unrelenting drought, floods and late freezes have all had an impact.

This has left the world at particular risk for a highly virulent wheat disease called African stem rust that is quickly spreading to places such as Uganda, Ethiopia, Yemen, India, Pakistan and Iran.

"We have never been less secure about the near term future of wheat," Schafer said. "With over 75 percent of US wheat acres planted to varieties that are highly susceptible to this disease, the threat here at home is real and it is urgent."

The disease, which is carried by wind spores, would be devastating to global food supplies if it affects the US wheat crops, now valued at $16 billion.

The United States has shipped wheat breeding lines to east Africa, where scientists are working to find a rust-resistant strain and new protective measures.

"This is an international science partnership at its best in the face of crisis that threatens most of the world's food," Schafer told about 700 people from 25 countries.

Source: FAO

The Bush administration is pushing a proposal to designate 25 percent of the food aid from the United States for cash purchases in other countries, rather than shipping only US-grown commodities. Gaddi Vasquez, US ambassador to FAO urged Congress to back the proposal.

"The ultimate objective," Vasquez said, "is to help countries battling hunger to feed their own people."

Developing countries risk exacerbating the food crisis if they turn away from selling produce on the global market to promote self-sufficiency, US and United Nations agricultural officials have warned.

Ambassador Vasquez has said a “return to [food] self-sufficiency could complicate an already difficult issue”.

Recent developments such as China and the United Arab Emirates, considering buying land overseas to produce food for its home markets and France's call for Africa and Latin America to adopt versions of Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy to form food self-sufficient blocs coupled with export restrictions, have raised fears about protectionism.

Michel Barnier, France’s farm minister, recently said it was a mistake to leave “feeding people to the mercy of the market”.

Barnier's motivation is to protect French farmers while removing opportunities for farmers in developing countries to sell cash crops and handing more control to corrupt elites.

Self-sufficiency policies were used from the 1960s to the early 1980s, often accompanied by strategic stockpiling to buffer countries against crop failures. A return to those policies would reduce an already thin global food market, leaving countries that are unable to increase their output more vulnerable to shocks, officials said.

“Food is a global market,” Ambassador Vasquez told the FT. “Where does this [self-sufficiency] leave countries that cannot build agricultural capacity?”

Only 7 per cent of the world’s rice crop and less than 20 per cent of its wheat is traded internationally.

The FAO is planning to host a high-level conference on the food crisis in Rome next month. French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to attend but despite the huge rise in prices, European farmers want to retain their subsidies and protections. Irish farmers want a ban on beef imports to the EU and are threatening to vote against a referendum on the Lisbon reform treaty, even though the majority of their income comes from German, Dutch and British taxpayers.

Ireland will continue to be a net recipient of the EU budget until 2013.