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NEW DELHI: The head of the United Nations’ Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Wednesday urged world leaders to
attend a summit in early June to discuss what he described as an
“emergency” global food shortage.
“In the face of food riots
around the world like in Africa and Haiti, we really have an
emergency,” FAO chief Jacques Diouf told a news conference in New
Delhi.
Diouf said that as populations
move to the cities, food output has stagnated, prices have risen,
and food stocks are at their lowest since 1980.
He added that this crisis should
be addressed by the 191 members of the FAO in Rome in early June.
Diouf said that in fast-growing
countries such as India and China, which together account for a
third of the world’s population, “demand for more milk and more
meat because of economic growth of 8 [percent] to 10 percent means
higher demand for more cereals” that in turn worsens food
shortages.
Lennart Bage, the president of
the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, said
governments were waking up to the problem.
“There is a real realization
that we cannot take food and food security for granted anymore,”
said the official, who was speaking at the end of a UN conference on
agro-business.
The head of the UN’s Industrial
Development Organization (UNIDO), Kandeh Yumkella, said wider
trade links and a focus on agro-business, or the business of food
production, were the long-term answers to the shortages.
He added that by 2030, more than
half the world’s population will live in urban areas and require
sophisticated methods to bring in food.
“We need to look at
supermarkets and how they deliver food to be processed to the
consumer. We need to pass that technology to developing countries
and understand the processes to increase shelf life of basic
foods,” Yumkella said.
At least five persons have died
in violent protests against high food and fuel prices in Haiti’s
capital, while there have been similar deadly disturbances in
Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Mauritania.
--AFP
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