Years of poor decisions created global food crisis
Foreign Desk Report

PARIS—Poor policy decisions over the past two decades have combined to create the current food crisis and resources must now be focused on the 2008 harvest, the head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Wednesday. The United Nations has warned that millions of people are threatened by hunger around the world because of the recent surge in food prices, but FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said solutions were available.
“This is not Greek tragedy where fate is decided by the gods and humans can do nothing about it. No, we have the ability to influence our futures,” he told a news conference. “It’s a good thing that international institutions .. are helping the poor gain access to food, but on our side we need to fight the most important battle today which is to ensure the 2008 farming season is a success,” he added.
Increased food demand from rapidly developing nations such as China, the use of crops for biofuels, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are all blamed for pushing prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice to record highs. That in turn has sparked food riots in several African countries, Indonesia and Haiti, and the FAO has warned that 37 countries face food crises.
Diouf said the Rome-based FAO had been signaling the dangers for years. “The situation we are in is the result of inappropriate policies over the past 20 years. Between 1990 and 2000 we lowered food aid for agriculture by half,” he said. Generous farm subsidies in wealthy countries had also discouraged agriculture in the developing world, further aggravating the situation, he said.
“Above all we have not invested in water management in different countries of the third world... In Africa only 7 percent of land is arable,” he added. The FAO has forecast a 2.6 percent hike in global cereal output this year. Diouf said he thought output could be significantly boosted in the coming years if major nations opted to invest in agriculture and agricultural aid. “We have lacked two things: the political will and resources. I hope that this current crisis will give us the political will and the resources to do things”.
A “silent tsunami” unleashed by costlier food threatens 100 million people, the United Nations said on Tuesday, but views differed as to how to stop it. Aid bodies said there was enough food to go round but the key was to help the poor afford it, and urged producing nations not to curb exports to stockpile food at home. In London, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain would seek changes to EU biofuels targets if it was shown that planting crops for fuel was driving up food prices — a day after the bloc stood by its plans to boost biofuel use.
Britain also pledged $900 million to help the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) alleviate immediate problems and address longer-term solutions to “help put food on the table for nearly a billion people going hungry across the world”. The WFP, whose head Josette Sheeran took part in a meeting of experts Brown called on Tuesday to discuss the crisis, said a “silent tsunami” threatened to plunge over 100 million people on every continent into hunger.
“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” she said ahead of the meeting. Riots in poor Asian and African countries have followed steep rises in food prices caused by many factors — dearer fuel, bad weather, rising disposable incomes boosting demand and the conversion of land to grow crops for biofuel.
Rice from Thailand, the world’s top exporter, has more than doubled in price this year. Sheeran said artificially created shortages, such as those caused by countries that have slowed or stopped exports, were worsening the problem
Major food exporters including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Cambodia have closed their stocks to safeguard supplies. “The world has been consuming more than it has been producing for the past three years, so stocks have been drawn down,” Sheeran said. “The world knows how to produce food and will do so. But we will have a couple of challenging years.”
Rising prices meant the WFP was running short of money to buy food for its programmes and had already curtailed school feeding plans in Tajikistan, Kenya and Cambodia. Sheeran said WFP, which last year estimated it would need $2.9 billion in 2008 to cover its needs, now calculated it would have to raise that figure by one quarter because of the surge in prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice.
She said this was the biggest challenge in the WFP’s 45-year history. “The era of cheap food is over,” said Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank. He urged Asian governments not to distort markets with export curbs but use fiscal measures to help the poor.
“We want to temper what we think is a bit of an over-reaction. There is still enough supply,” he said. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said dearer food risked wiping out progress on cutting poverty.