Christine Stebbins Reuters 17 Oct 09;
DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Agribusiness leaders are stepping up investment and technology to tackle world hunger and climate problems tied to agriculture, but they see no quick solution to hunger, which kills 25,000 people a day around the world.
"I'm not much of magic bullet guy and I really do believe in a multiplicity of approaches," Mark Cackler, who overseas rural poverty and agriculture programs for The World Bank, said in an interview at the World Food Prize forum on Friday.
"Each of us in our own way have the capacity, the potential and the duty to be leaders," he said.
Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, confronted Cackler and others at the annual gathering of world food industry leaders here with a challenge "in which the food sector of the world, which is the single largest sector of the world economy, is really at the heart of multiple intersecting crises."
"While there is discussion on each of these issues, I don't think we're on a trajectory of solution right now," Sachs said.
Sachs later told Reuters: "Pepsi or Monsanto or the big grain trading companies -- I want them to come to the forefront and to the lead of solving some of these problems."
"We cannot go on the way we're going and we need the food industry to say it first and foremost because we can't do this without the food industry's leadership to solve the problems."
Cackler said many participants at the forum had been discussing Sachs's critique and challenge.
"Jeff is absolutely right when he talks about the severity and the magnitude of the problem and how it's insufficiently recognized. God bless him for reminding us fervently about how serious these problems are," Cackler said.
"The fact that 25,000 people die every day of hunger and malnutrition, the fact over a billion go to bed hungry tonight is shameful," Cackler said.
But he added: "There are no magic bullets."
A FEW MORE GREEN SHOOTS?
Cackler and executives at the three-day conference pointed out areas of progress such as increases in public and private investment in areas of Africa, which along with South Asia dominates world hunger concerns.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced $120 million in grants to boost self-help efforts in agriculture in Africa and South Asia. Microsoft founder Gates told forum participants they must work together better.
"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates said, citing a fight over gene-altered crops.
J.B. Penn, chief economist at equipment giant John Deere, called for more research and development funding from both the public and private sectors as well as "more investment in infrastructure around the world in rural areas like ports, storage, farm-to-market roads."
Penn also urged policy changes such as "better incentives for farmers to produce and for people to transport and process the food."
Cackler said the private sector should do more on crops and cropping systems for poor farmers in poor countries and that governments need to improve trading systems.
"Often it's not a question of direction. The direction is largely good, which is why I'm optimistic. It's the pace, and that's where I get very impatient," he said.
Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo Inc, the world's second-largest soft drinks maker, told the conference: "It is within our power and not beyond our expertise to consign this suffering to history. We must do what we can."
Climate change complicates efforts to fight hunger.
Carl Hausmann, chief executive of global agribusiness giant Bunge's North American operations, said agriculture will need to double food production in 40 years even as it reduces its big environmental impacts on a changing climate.
"We have doubled production before but in ways that use more water, more land, more fertilizer," Hausmann said, adding that it "hasn't always been as soft on the environment as we will need to be in the future. Doubling again while using less water, less land, less crop inputs, might be an issue."
(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by David Gregorio)
