The UN Food and Agriculture Organization asked the world's countries today for $30 billion a year to "re-launch world agriculture" and deal with food shortages that have caused soaring food prices, hunger and unrest worldwide. The call came at the start of a three-day intergovernmental meeting at FAO headquarters in Rome to deal with the doubling of average world food prices since 2000, which has accelerated sharply in the past six months. In an indication of the seriousness of the situation, 44 heads of government are attending.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization asked the world's countries today for $30 billion a year to "re-launch world agriculture" and deal with food shortages that have caused soaring food prices, hunger and unrest worldwide.
The call came at the start of a three-day intergovernmental meeting at FAO headquarters in Rome to deal with the doubling of average world food prices since 2000, which has accelerated sharply in the past six months. In an indication of the seriousness of the situation, 44 heads of government are attending.
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FAO chief Jacques Diouf told the meeting that he had warned nations last year of the gathering crisis, and asked for $1.7 billion last December to maintain food production in poor countries by giving farmers emergency access to seed, fertilisers and animal feed, the prices of which had jumped from 60 to 98% in the preceding year.
"It was all to no effect," he said. "Only when those excluded from the banquet of the rich went into the streets to express their anger and desperation were responses made."
Lack of investment
Yet those emergency responses are against a background of steadily falling assistance for food production in poor countries, Diouf said, visibly angry. Aid to agriculture has dropped by 58% since 1980, and fell from 17 to 3% of all development aid.
Diouf also called it "inexplicable" that despite globalisation there has been little investment in preventing communicable animal and crop diseases, including the Ug99 strain of stem rust which, he said, threatens wheat crops in India and China.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking at the conference, said that food production will have to increase 50% by 2030 just to deal with projected population increase.
"Countries must support promising research into the optimal production of crops and better animal production," he said, as well as applying known technologies to the existing food chain.
