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WASHINGTON: The World Bank meets here Sunday as rising food prices
spark deadly unrest in developing countries, underscoring the
urgency of getting food aid to desperate people.
Policymakers of the anti-poverty bank are due to
discuss a massive, coordinated international plan to reduce hunger
announced less than two weeks ago by the head of the bank, Robert
Zoellick.
With soaring food prices threatening political
stability in poor countries, Zoellick called for a “new deal”
for global food policy, similar in scope to a 1930s program under US
President Franklin Roosevelt that tackled the problems of the Great
Depression.
The World Bank meeting comes against a backdrop
of a mounting global financial crisis, a US economy teetering on
recession, high energy prices and currency market imbalances.
Escalating inflation is compli-cating
policymakers’ efforts to revive stuttering economic growth.
The 185-nation bank’s sister institution, the
International Monetary Fund, issued a dire warning Saturday about
the food crisis at their spring meetings in Washington.
“Food prices, if they go on like they are
doing today ... the consequences will be terrible,” IMF Managing Director Dominque
Strauss-Kahn said.
“Hundreds of thousands of people will be
starving ... [leading] to disruption of the economic environment,”
Strauss-Kahn told a news conference at the close of the IMF meeting.
Development gains made in the past five or 10
years could be “totally destroyed,” he said, warning that social
unrest could even lead to war.
“As we know, learning from the past, those
kind of questions sometimes end in war,” he said. If the world
wanted to avoid “these terrible consequences,” then rising
prices had to be tackled.
Skyrocketing prices on rice, wheat, corn and
other staple foods like milk particularly hurt developing nations,
where the bulk of income is spent on the bare necessities for
survival.
Higher energy prices, too, are driving up the
cost of food, as well as stoking broader inflation.
In recent months, rising food costs have led to
violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania,
Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines, Indonesia and other
countries in the past month.
Haiti’s prime minister was ousted Saturday in
a no-confidence vote after more than a week of violent
demonstrations over rocketing food and fuel prices.
In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been
deployed to avoid the seizure of food from fields and warehouses.
37 countries currently face food crisis,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Zoellick is urging countries to provide the
minimum $500 million immediately sought by the World Food Program in
the mounting food crisis.
The World Bank plans to nearly double its
lending for agriculture in Africa, to $800 million.
Zoellick proposed three other measures to soften
the impact of a slowing world economy on the most vulnerable
countries: investment in Africa by sovereign wealth funds;
strengthening a 2002 initiative to improve governance in
resource-rich countries; and conclusion of the World Trade
Organization’s trade liberalization negotiations.
-- AFP
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