Behind the Headlines Israeli Plans for Fighting Famine Around the World

Israeli economists and agricultural researchers hope that a thaw in the cool relations between Israel and Egypt may revive plans for a joint venture which could help relieve famine in various parts of the world such as the one causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in Ethiopia.

The joint venture was based on the use of an Israeli invention developed four years ago and already in use in the Negev for the long-term storage of grains.

In Israel, this approach to grain storage is used for stocking imported grains. The Israel-Egypt plan, discussed but never implemented, would preserve surplus stocks for eventualities such as the Ethiopian famine.

THE NATURE OF THE ISRAELI INVENTION

The Israeli invention, a product of the Volcani Center for Agricultural Research at Bet Dagon near Tel Aviv, is a huge plastic tent-like structure supported on a thick wire mesh. The plastic is the same used to protect Israel’s combat tanks from the broiling sun.

The plastic silos began as an experiment utilizing dry desert conditions to preserve grain stocks without pesticides. Wheat stored in the plastic silos has deteriorated by only one-tenth of one percent over two years.

According to the data available to Israeli experts, the Ethiopians use pesticides. But rodents, insects and mould are said to destroy up to 50 percent of grain stored each season.

THE SECRET OF ISRAEL’S SUCCESS

The secret of Israel’s success, according to Jonathan Donohay, of the Volcani Center, is that it is air-tight:

“You get a form of hermetic storage where, if there are insects-and generally there are insects present-or if some of the outer layers of the grain become a bit damp due to moisture ingress and mould starts to develop, you get production of carbon dioxide, and so you get low oxygen concentrations and high carbon dioxide concentrations that are eventually sufficient to kill off the insects-and so you get a sort of self-sterilization effect.”

Like much of Africa, Israel imports most of its grain. But unlike the African countries, Israel has silos around the country for storage, and has an efficient road and trucking system for distribution.

CROP FAILURES CAN BE AVERTED

The man in charge of the import of essential foods into Israel is Meir Yagil, of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. He maintains that food shortages can be predicted six months in advance; the famine in Ethiopia was foreseen three years before it materialized. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA) had issued warnings well in advance and has since warned of other food shortages likely to occur elsewhere in the world.

But as so often happens, the warnings were disregarded until it was too late.

Yagil says that with the first indication of crop failures, countries like Ethiopia could avert disaster by trucking the Israeli-invented plastic solos into crisis areas where they could be assembled and filled with grain stocks to act as a buffer against the lean years.

AN ISRAELI INNOVATION

Even though it does not need to truck silos around the country, Israel does use the plastic tents. They cost only about $20 per ton of storage capacity and they can be used year after year. A concrete silo, of the type familiar throughout the world,costs hundreds of dollars a ton to build.

Israel presently has 30 of the 1,000-ton capacity plastic silos for grain storage in the southern Kiryat Gat region. Zvi Dromi, manager of the southern storage area, helped develop the new silos and he will probably be sent abroad to help set up any that are exported.

He claims that the reason Israel has not yet exported the plastic silos is that other countries do not know about them. Dromi says: “We haven’t got the right system to market them because that costs a lot of money and I can’t send anyone around the world on a marketing tour.”

As for international bodies such as the FOA, Dromi says: “I think they don’t know the potential of the system, and they don’t know how quickly we can build them here in Israel. And my heart breaks when I hear that in Ethiopia, especially, people are dying because they don’t have food or a piece of bread to eat.”

He says that to feed eight million people in a place like Ethiopia, 300 plastic silos are required for each 1,000 tons. “You can use each silo two or three times a year. But you don’t have to wait for all 300. You can start with something like 50, and even that small number would help the starving people of Ethiopia-or those who may starve in the future in other predictable famines.”

Dromi says that to prepare and ship 50 silos to Ethiopia, and then set them up at the needy sites, would take no more than three months.

ISRAEL IS READY FOR FUTURE EVENTUALITIES

The Israeli plastic silo experiment was started four years ago, and from the earliest days plans were drawn up for a joint Israel-Egypt venture in which the Israeli-made and supplied plastic silos would form the basis of what the Volcani Institute hoped would be the establishment of an emergency grain storage area in the Sinai, to serve Asia and Africa.

The Institute’s scientists say that grain could have been trucked from such a storage area to Ethiopia in three days, as opposed to the three weeks it took to ship supplies from the United States.

The hot, dry Sinai climate would be ideal for the self-sterilization process brought about by the effect of the giant plastic bag on grain preservation against insect and moisture damage.

It was the cooling-off of relations on the part of the Egyptians which shelved the joint venture idea. Volcani researchers hope that now that the “freeze” appears to be coming to an end, the idea may be revived and implemented.

The famine in Ethiopia will not be the last shortage in Asia and Africa. Others are predicted. Israel is ready with its plastic silos to store the surpluses of fat years to feed the hungry in the lean years.