MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

FAO wants 30 billion annually to re-launch agriculture

Noting that the time for talk was over and that action was urgently needed, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf appealed to world leaders for 30 billion US dollars a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food.

At the opening of the Rome Summit called to de-fuse the current world food crisis, Dr Diouf underlined that in 2006 the world spent 1200 billion US dollars on arms while food wasted in a single country could cost 100 billion and excess consumption by the world's obese amounted to 20 billion US dollars. "Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find 30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?" Dr Diouf asked. "It is resources of this order of magnitude that would make it possible definitely to lay to rest the specter of conflicts over food that are looming on the horizon," he added. "The structural solution to the problem of food security in the world lies in increasing production and productivity in the low-income, food-deficit countries," he declared. This called for "innovative and imaginative solutions", including "partnership agreements ... between countries that have financial resources, management capabilities and technologies and countries that have land, water and human resources". The current world food crisis had already had "tragic political and social consequences in different countries" and could further "endanger world peace and security", Dr Diouf said. But the crisis was in essence a "chronicle of disaster foretold", he noted. Despite the World Food Summit's solemn pledge in 1996 to halve world food hunger by 2015, resources to finance agricultural programs in developing countries had not only failed to rise but decreased significantly since then. Some 24 billion would have been needed to fund an anti-hunger program prepared for the second World Food Summit held in 2002, Dr Diouf recalled. "In cooperation with FAO, the developing countries did in fact prepare policies, strategies and programs that, if they had received appropriate funding, would have assured world food security," he said. But, he continued, "today the facts speak for themselves: from 1980 to 2005 aid to agriculture fell from 8 billion (2004 basis) in 1984 to 3.4 billion in 2004, representing a reduction in real terms of 58%". Agriculture's share of Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell from 17% in 1980 to 3% percent in 2006, he also recalled. "Regrettably the international community only reacts when the media beam the distressing spectacle of world suffering into the homes of the wealthy countries," Dr Diouf commented. "Important today is to realize that the time for talking is long past," he stressed. "Now is the time for action". Dr. Diouf also described as incomprehensible that subsidies worth 11-12 billion US dollars in 2006 were used to divert 100 million tonnes of cereals from human consumption "mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuels for vehicles". Inexplicable too was that in a time of globalization there has been no significant investment in the prevention of a long list of major trans-boundary animal diseases, starting with Newcastle and foot-and-mouth diseases. But the basic contradiction lay in the fact that OECD countries were distorting world markets, spending 372 billion US dollars in 2006 alone to support their agriculture. "The problem of food insecurity is a political one, "Dr Diouf concluded. "It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it those choices made by Governments that determine the allocation of resources".