|
ROME: World leaders are set to gather in Rome on Tuesday for a
high-profile summit on food security as runaway prices have sparked
riots across the world.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon will open the
conference by unveiling an “action plan” to confront the
scourge, diplomats said ahead of the conference, which lasts through
Thursday, at the Food and Agriculture Organization’s headquarters
here.
The plan was put together by a crisis team
involving the heads of several UN agencies and the Bretton Woods
institutions, the sources said.
Unrest tied to food price inflation has erupted
in Egypt, Haiti, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia,
Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia, turning the
long-scheduled FAO conference into an emergency meeting, Director
General Jacques Diouf said last month.
Diouf warned of civil war in some countries
because of global food shortages and called for a revamp of the
international food system.
He said that international leaders had failed to
act on warnings by the FAO, leading to what he called a
“predictable catastrophe.”
Diouf stopped short of calling for a moratorium
on biofuel development—which the UN’s former independent expert
on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, has called a “crime against
humanity.”
Participants at the High-Level Conference on
World Food Security will discuss short-term solutions as well as new
strategies to deal with the effects of global warming, growing
demand for biofuels and a crumbling agriculture sector in much of
the developing world.
The food crisis has sparked riots, protests and
export restrictions worldwide.
Summit organizer Herve Lejeune said the meeting
would be “a start of a process putting the food issue back at the
top of the international agenda.”
He told Agence France-Presse: “When we planned
this summit a year ago, it was to address the long-term impact of
global warming and biofuels on food security. Now we have the price
surges. So the immediate problems as well as the need to invest in
long-term agricultural policies will be at the heart of the
conference.”
A major joint report issued last Thursday by the
FAO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
warned that high global food prices are a new fact of life.
At the same time, the FAO reported that 22
countries, mostly in Africa, were at severe risk from record food
and fuel costs.
The FAO is calling for between $1.2 billion and
$1.7 billion in emergency aid to deliver seed and fertilizer to
countries in need for 2008 to 2009, even though the Rome meeting is
not touted as a fundraiser.
The presidents of Brazil, France, Argentina,
Egypt and Iran, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Nicolas Sarkozy, Cristina
Kirchner, Hosni Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have confirmed
their plans to attend the conference.
Italy’s staunchly pro-US new Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi has ruled out a meeting with Ahmadinejad.
The Spanish and Japanese Prime Ministers Jose
Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Yasuo Fukuda are also expected at the
meeting of representatives of the FAO’s 193 member-states.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his
counterpart at the International Monetary Fund, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, also plan to attend.
“The fact that so many political officials are
responding to the call shows the importance placed by the
international community on food and farming issues,” FAO Deputy
Director Jose Maria Sumpsi told Agence France-Presse.
“It will be a chance to reflect together on
these subjects but especially to have many bilateral meetings,
notably between states that suffer the most from the crisis and
those accused of aggravating it with their policies,” Sumpsi said.
Global food prices have nearly doubled in three
years, according to the World Bank.
Rising use of biofuels, trade restrictions,
increased demand for meat in a more affluent Asia, poor harvests and
increasing transport costs have all been blamed for the price rises.
Zoellick has said two billion people across the
world are struggling with high food prices, and 100 million people
in poor countries may be pushed deeper into poverty by the crisis.
-- AFP
|
