The world, it seems, is down on its luck.
As the global food crisis threatens to get worse and the price of oil soars almost daily, leaders haggled on Thursday over the wording of a document proposing actions to deal with hunger. According to media reports, the just-concluded World Food Security Summit in Rome almost collapsed and ended contentiously with leaders from this part of the world protesting that not much had been accomplished and that the agreement reached would not fully address the problem.
The three-day summit was called by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as an emergency response to high food prices that officials said could threaten nearly one billion people with starvation. However, even before the recent food price spikes, there were already an estimated one billion people suffering from chronic hunger; another two billion experiencing malnutrition and some 18,000 children dying daily as a direct or indirect consequence of hunger.
One would have expected then, that with the common goal of preventing starvation uniting them world leaders and/or their representatives at the end of the meeting, would have presented a strong commitment to attaining and preserving food security and putting a dent in world hunger. It was not to be.
News reports said Latin American leaders were bitter over the fudging with regard to condemning subsidies maintained by wealthy nations and price-aggravating controls exercised by big agricultural companies. There was also a major dispute over bio-fuel, which, critics argue, converts too high a proportion of food grains into ethanol for motor vehicles, when instead they could be used to feed hungry families.
It does seem wrong that charitable organizations are continually begging for donations to get food and medicines to starving children in Africa and Asia, while on the other hand, food grains are being burned in the developed world to move engines. However, it is in fact a no-win situation. Sources of clean fuel – and ethanol is one such – must be found and in sufficient quantities to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, which are not only growing more expensive, but also cause damage to the environment and precipitate climate change.
At the end of the summit, an agreement was reached that there would be an in-depth study on the use of bio-fuel in order to ensure that the production of fuel from farm products does not affect global food supply. Proponents of bio-fuel have argued that this is not the case and the reports do not say what action would be taken if the study proved them wrong.
Additionally, there was concurrence on “the easing of trade barriers and the supply of seeds and fertilizers to poor farmers,” according to one news report, as well as the adoption of what one hopes is not another useless slogan ‘eliminating hunger and securing access to food for all, today and tomorrow.’
The UN now says that some $30 billion a year is needed to fight hunger, which if not addressed can move from being a humanitarian, economic and political problem to threatening security. Business and political leaders in the region obviously recognize this as well and have moved to tackle the issue at the agriculture investment forum, which concludes here today. Hopefully what will emerge from this forum will set the Caribbean up as a shining example for the rest of the world.
