Stephen Brown and Robin Pomeroy, PlanetArk 4 Jun 08;
ROME - A United Nations summit on the global food crisis called on Tuesday for trade barriers to be reduced and food export bans scrapped to help stop the spread of hunger that threatens nearly one billion people.
"Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Rome summit, where the United States and Brazil defended biofuel production from charges that it pushes up world food prices.
The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), hosting the summit, said wealthy nations spent billions of dollars on farm subsidies, excess food consumption and arms.
"The excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20 billion annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100 billion resulting from premature death and related diseases," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, who is from Senegal.
Humanitarian agencies estimate soaring food prices could push as many as 100 million more people into hunger. About 850 million are already going hungry.
Ban estimated the "global price tag" to overcome the food crisis would be $15-20 billion a year and that food supply had to rise 50 percent by the year 2030 to meet climbing demand.
"Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing draft controls," he said, referring to controls slapped on foods in emergency to guarantee domestic supply.
This "distorts markets and forces prices even higher. I call on nations to resist such measures and to immediately release exports designated for humanitarian purposes".
Aid agencies blame some Asian nations' export restrictions on rice, for example, for driving up prices, which led to riots as far abroad as Haiti in April, toppling the government.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
The Rome summit will set the tone on food aid and subsidies for the Group of Eight summit in Japan in July and what is hoped to be the concluding stages of the stalled Doha talks under the World Trade Organisation aimed at reducing trade distortions.
WTO chief Pascal Lamy said a Doha deal "would reduce the trade-distorting subsidies that have stymied the developing world's production capacity". Of the 22 countries most affected by the food crisis, "some are amongst the world's least trade integrated economies in agriculture", he said in a speech.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said rich nations' "intolerable protectionism" was the main cause of food inflation while US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer focused on export restrictions, blamed for restricting food supplies.
"We ask all countries to allow the free flow of food and the technologies that produce food," said Schafer.
Britain urged the European Union to cool prices by reforming farm policies that cost consumers over 40 billion euros ($62.4 billion) a year and said trade talks were at a "critical" stage.
"It is unacceptable that rich countries still subsidise farming by $1 billion a day, costing poor farmers in developing countries an estimated $100 billion a year in lost income," said British International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander.
The cost of major food commodities has doubled over the last couple of years, with rice, corn and wheat at record highs. This has provoked protests and riots in some developing countries where people may spend more than half their income on food.
The OECD sees prices retreating from their current peaks but still up to 50 percent higher in the coming decade.
DIRTY FINGERS
Rising fuel prices, as well as making agricultural supplies like seeds and fertilisers more costly, have raised interest in biofuels, blamed by many for competing with food output for grains and oilseed.
The United States and Brazil, the world's biggest producer of ethanol from sugar cane, defended their biofuels industries from such accusations in Rome. "It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal," da Silva told the summit.
The United States plans to channel a quarter of its maize crop into ethanol production by 2022 and the European Union plans to get 10 percent of auto fuel from bio-energy by 2020.
Washington says biofuels account for only three percent of the total food price rise while Oxfam puts it at 30 percent.
"The use of sustainable biofuels can increase energy security, foster economic development especially in rural areas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily on food prices," said Schafer.
The summit was attended by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both accused by their critics of contributing to food shortages at home.
Washington said Mugabe's presence could only serve as an example of "what not to do" on food security. A State Department spokesman said his "ruinous policies" had turned Zimbabwe from a food exporter into a net importer with many starving people.
Italian Jews protested against the Iranian leader's comments that Israel would disappear, chanting "Israel, Israel, Israel" on a hill by the ancient Roman Circus Maximus, near the summit.
UN sets out food crisis measures
BBC News 3 Jun 08;
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged nations to seize an "historic opportunity to revitalise agriculture" as a way of tackling the food crisis.
Mr Ban told a UN-sponsored summit in Rome that food production would have to rise by 50% by 2030 to meet demand.
Mr Ban said export restrictions and import tariffs ought to be minimised to alleviate the crisis.
The summit comes as food costs have reached a 30-year high in real terms, causing riots in several countries.
The host of the conference - the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) - has warned the industrialised countries that unless they increase yields, eliminate barriers and move food to where it is needed most, a global catastrophe could result.
The FAO is calling for $1.7bn of emergency funding to tackle the shortage in production.
The recent crisis is believed to have pushed 100 million people into hunger worldwide.
Poorer countries are faced with a 40% increase in their food imports bill this year, and experts say some countries' food bills have doubled in the past year.
In other developments at the summit:
* Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said the two key issues were "global warming and the use of agricultural commodities for the reproduction of biofuels"
* Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a leading US critic, cited "certain powers" and "invisible hands" as trying "to control prices to achieve their political and economic aims"
* Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva defended his country's production of biofuels, saying that blaming ethanol production for food price rises was an "affront"
Access problem
In his speech Mr Ban said the instability caused by the price rises threatened progress made in countries like Afghanistan, Liberia and Haiti. He talked of people in Liberia who used to buy rice by the bag and now bought it by the cup.
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Mr Mugabe said that climate change has contributed to a global food crisis
The taskforce Mr Ban created to target the food crisis is expected to present a 38-page report with measures that could cost up to $15bn (£7.5bn) to implement.
Announcing some of its findings, Mr Ban said high food prices offered a chance to finally address the ongoing problem of access to food for the world's poor.
"The threats are obvious to us all. Yet this crisis also presents us with an opportunity," he said.
"While we must respond immediately to high food prices, it is important that our longer term focus is on improving world food security," he said.
Measures to improve access to food for vulnerable people include expanding aid, boosting smallholder production and minimising export restriction and import tariffs, he added.
Global catastrophe if food riots spread
Straits Times 4 Jun 08;
As rights activists sound warning, UN chief calls for rise in production
ROME - AS WORLD leaders discuss the food crisis, human rights activists and the World Bank are warning of a looming global catastrophe which could plunge much of the planet into violence.
The United Nations food security summit yesterday heard UN chief Ban Ki Moon call for a 50per cent increase in food production to help deal with soaring food prices which have already provoked riots around the world.
But ahead of the meeting, human rights activists and the World Bank stressed that words would not be enough to help the world's poor, and warned of dire consequences if action was not taken.
Johannesburg-based poverty campaign group ActionAid said: 'The current food crisis amounts to a gross violation of human rights and could fuel a global catastrophe, as many of the world's poorest countries, particularly those forced into import dependency, struggle to feed their people.'
Poor harvests, low stocks and rising demand, especially from India and China, have caused huge food price spikes over the last two years, stoking protests, strikes and violence in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is warning that increased hunger will exacerbate conflict in war zones, while experts say food riots could worsen if nothing is done.
'Our estimate is that higher food prices are pushing 30million Africans into poverty,' World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said, adding that the message he received from Africans is that they are tired of talk and want action.
'We have a lot of world leaders here; let's try to focus on what we can do in
real time to make a difference,' said Mr Zoellick, who last week announced US$1.2billion (S$1.6billion) in loans and grants to help poor countries cope with food and fuel costs.
He said immediate action was needed to deliver aid to the countries most at risk, to send seeds and fertilisers to poor farmers, and to lift export bans which are driving up prices.
Meanwhile, The Times of London reported yesterday that the world leaders attending the summit would be enjoying a 'modest' lunch, with the lobster, goose and foie gras served at the last summit replaced by pasta, mozzarella, spinach and sweetcorn.
It quoted a Food and Agriculture Organisation official as saying: 'It does not look good if leaders discussing global starvation are seen to be dining lavishly.
'At the last summit in 2002, we did not give enough thought to the menu and were open - unfairly, in our view - to the charge of hypocrisy.'
REUTERS
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