With soaring world food prices and unrest in the Middle East, boosting food production and finding agriculture-related employment for disenchanted young people are now crucial, experts say
ROME (AlertNet) – With world food prices soaring and unrest surging in the Middle East, boosting food production and finding agriculture-related jobs for disenchanted young people are now crucial, keynote speakers told the annual meeting of the U.N. fund for reducing rural poverty.
“Food is the most basic human need. When it’s not met, people do take action,” Princess Haya Al Hussein, daughter of Jordan’s late King Hussein, warned delegates at an annual meeting of the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
“Events in the Middle East can be described as an alarm call or wake up call for the region, but they should be a wakeup call for the entire world,” said Princess Haya, wife of Dubai’s ruler and a U.N. peace ambassador.
Princess Haya said political leaders were “morally bankrupt” for not having taken more forceful action to deal with hunger, and for not following through on pledges to provide aid.
World food prices - driven up in part by crop losses to extreme weather in Australia, Sri Lanka, Brazil and elsewhere – are hovering around 2008 levels that triggered riots in different parts of the world.
The price hikes, discussed at a weekend meeting of leading G-20 economies in Paris, threaten to reignite inflation, reverse hard-won reductions in poverty and lead to spreading protest, U.N. and World Bank officials have said.
Protestors angry about rising food costs have taken to the streets in nations from Bolivia to Jordan this month, and experts say food price hikes are one of the factors behind continuing protests in north Africa and the Middle East that have driven out the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt.
“Current events show the energy, creativity and power of young people, and also the importance of ensuring they can see a future for themselves in the societies in which they live,” cautioned Kanayo Nwanze, the president of IFAD, which seeks to curb rural poverty.
A fast-growing world population, continuing instability in the world’s economies and financial markets and a recent surge of climate change-linked floods and droughts that have destroyed crops mean “these are difficult days for those of us concerned about the state of rural poverty and food security,” the U.N. rural poverty chief said.
Food prices were among the top issues discussed at this weekend’s meeting of leading G-20 economies in Paris. Representatives were expected to consider whether to regulate speculative trading in food – blamed for some of the run-up in prices – and had been asked to consider a range of other measures, including a tax on financial transactions to help address climate change and other pressures on food supply.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in September estimated the number of people hungry worldwide at 925 million. Food experts believe that number, which had been falling, may now have crept back above a billion as a result of pressures including recent price hikes that have cut the ability of poor families to buy sufficient food.
Current high food prices may be long lasting, warned former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who spoke at the IFAD conference.
With population growth and increasing losses of crops to extreme weather linked to climate change, “local shortages are unlikely to be temporary”, he said.
Overcoming food shortages in Africa, which has the world’s largest proportion of hungry people, will require African farmers turning away from cash crops for export in favour of producing more staple crops, predicted Annan, who now heads the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an effort backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help African farmers boost food production.
He said big farms could help smallholders but warned against the undermining of Africa’s small farmers by large-scale land acquisition, as water-starved Middle Eastern and other countries snap up leases on African land to improve their own food security.
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