Two articles, on agriculture and world's hunger count.
Agriculture being what it is in every society - a primary means for the tranquility of the people and the prosperity of the nation - why is it so underprioritized among the world's countries?
Excerpt from second article:
The FAO chief also warned that rising numbers of hungry people could spark
political instability, urging world leaders to remember that food riots erupted
in 30 countries last year. "The issue of world food security is an issue of
peace and national security," he told the paper.
Sources found here and here.
Food security still a problem as hunger rises -FAO
By Thin Lei Win
BANGKOK, March 30 (Reuters) - A fall in grain prices has led to the impression that food security is no longer a concern, but the number of people without enough to eat is still rising in a world facing recession, the United Nations said on Monday.
"The level of prices is still 19 percent above the average of 2006 ... so we're still in a period of high prices," Jacques Diouf, director-general of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), told reporters at a conference in Bangkok.
In addition, recent FAO studies showed that even though prices had fallen in international markets, retail prices in most developing countries had not.
"Not only is the crisis here, but it's been worsened by the financial and economic crisis," Diouf said.
Stocks for cereals were at a 30-year low, and he described the situation as "very fragile".
"We're afraid that if there are any serious climate factors affecting production, we will be back to where we were in 2007. We've seen serious floods in north America and southern Africa," he said.
The FAO estimates that over one billion people in the world will go hungry this year because of the combined effects of the global economic crisis and high food prices.
The number of chronically hungry people has been rising steadily -- by 75 million in 2007 and an estimated 40 million in 2008. By the end of 2008, 963 million people were undernourished, almost two-thirds of them in the Asia-Pacific region.
Diouf said aid needed to be directed back to agriculture.
"The first and foremost important element is the need to invest in agricultural production (to combat hunger), and this would require $30 billion a year," he said.
That sum, enough to help around 500 million small farmers, would have been considered high in the past, but he put it in the context of the trillions of dollars that Western governments had poured into schemes to stimulate their economies.
Between 2006 and 2008, the FAO says, fertiliser prices rose 170 percent and seeds and animal feed by at least 70 percent, putting them out of the reach of small farmers.
Diouf said aid donors needed to ensure agricultural funding went back to the levels of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when 17 percent of overseas development aid went to agriculture, facilitating a "green revolution" in Asia and Latin America.
By this decade, that share had dived to a mere 3 percent. (Reporting by Thin Lei Win; Editing by Alan Raybould)
World's hungry exceed 1 billion, U.N. tells Financial Times
27 Mar 2009
Written by: Megan Rowling
REUTERS/Rafiqur Rahman
The global economic crisis has contributed to pushing the number of hungry people in the world above 1 billion for the first time, the head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.
The credit crunch is exacerbating the impact of soaring food price inflation in 2007 and 2008, which had already boosted the ranks of the chronically hungry from less than 850 million before the food crisis to 963 million by the end of last year.
FAO director Jacques Diouf told the FT on Thursday that number had increased, and "unfortunately, we are already quoting a number of 1 billion people on average for this year".
An FAO spokesperson was unable to confirm the figure, adding that no new official data had been produced since December.
Diouf told the newspaper the financial crisis is worsening the hunger situation through higher unemployment, falling remittances - which many poor people rely on to buy food - and a drop in credit to support agricultural trade. "We are in a very unstable situation," he is quoted as saying.
The double whammy of the food and economic crises has reversed progress in reducing the proportion of the developing world's population who are undernourished. According to the FT, the figure dropped from 20 percent in the early 1990s to 16 percent from 2003-2005, but has now risen again to almost 18 percent.
In his interview with the newspaper, Diouf proposed replacing the U.N. Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015 with a target of "eradicating hunger by 2025".
The FAO chief also warned that rising numbers of hungry people could spark political instability, urging world leaders to remember that food riots erupted in 30 countries last year. "The issue of world food security is an issue of peace and national security," he told the paper.
FOOD SUMMIT?
Earlier this week, the U.N. agency said the heads of Caribbean countries, together with Brazil and Chile, had given their backing to Diouf's proposal for a World Summit on Food Security in November in Rome. The African Union and League of Arab States also support the gathering.
"The Summit should lead to greater coherence in the global governance of world food security," Diouf said in a statement. "It will define how we can improve policies and the structural aspects of the international agricultural system by putting forward lasting political, financial and technical solutions to the problem of food insecurity in the world."
The FAO head has repeatedly called for a new agricultural world order, urging the international community to provide $30 billion annually to improve rural infrastructure and boost agricultural production in developing countries.
"It is only in this way that we will succeed to eradicate hunger and feed a world population that will reach 9 billion in 2050," he said.
Diouf will speak at an Asia-Pacific FAO conference in Bangkok on Monday, focusing on volatile food prices and market uncertainties.
This month, the FAO launched a tool that allows users to track staple food prices on national markets in 55 developing countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Senior economist Liliana Balbi told AlertNet food prices may have dropped on international markets, but the database shows they have fallen much more slowly in poor countries, if at all.
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