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PARIS: High global food prices are a new fact of life, a major
report warned on Thursday as 22 countries, mostly in Africa, were
listed as being at severe risk from record food and fuel costs.
At the same time, there were calls for an end to
restrictions on the export of food, with open trade said to be vital
in any solution to the record prices which have sparked protests in
many countries.
The cost of feeding the family will remain far
higher than in the past decade, even though prices should ease in
coming years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a
report on the global agriculture outlook for the next 10 years.
The study was published against a background of
protests in countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in response
to soaring food prices.
The jump in prices has added to the number of
people in extreme hunger and some humanitarian aid is “urgently
required,” said the OECD and FAO joint report.
“Current high prices will hit the poor and
hungry people hardest,” it said.
OECD chief economist Angel Gurria added: “The
way to address rising food prices is not through protectionism but
to open up agricultural markets.”
The director general of the FAO, Jacques Diouf,
told a press conference that “coherent action is urgently needed
by the international community to deal with the impact of higher
prices on the hungry and poor.”
And in Yokohama, Japan, the head of the UN World
Food Progamme, Josette Sheeran, urged “all nations to allow us to
purchase food, even if they have controls for humanitarian purposes.
This is very critical.”
“Many nations have imposed export controls.
Today we buy 80 percent of our humanitarian food in the developing
world,” Sheeran noted.
In Rome, the FAO listed 22 countries, most of
them in Africa, which had high levels of “chronic hunger” and
were “especially vulnerable” to rising food and fuel prices.
The OECD-FAO report said hundreds of millions of
people were already going hungry before the price increases but that
“the numbers of people suffering from extreme hunger have [now]
increased even further.
“In the short term, humanitarian aid for the
populations in countries most severely affected is urgently
required,” the report said.
Several factors had coincided to drive the
“exceptional increases in prices” and some of the pressure would
ease in the next few years.
But the two bodies warned that food subsidies
and trade protection were not the answer, saying that high prices
might even be part of the solution by stimulating neglected
investment in agriculture in poor countries.
Raising food supplies in poor countries also
depended on improved government, infrastructure and property rights,
the OECD and the FAO said.
The report warned that rising prices had
endangered the UN Millennium Development Goal of eradicating hunger
and it was strongly skeptical about the benefits of
agriculture-based bio-fuels, which have contributed to higher costs.
However, the “transitory nature” of some of
the factors behind the recent trend meant that prices would fall in
due course from record peaks.
The report pointed to “adverse weather
conditions in major grain-producing regions of the world, with
spillover effects on crops and livestock that compete for the same
land.
“These conditions are not new. They have
happened in the past and prices have come down once more normal
conditions prevail and supply responds over time.”
There was “no reason to believe that this will
not recur over the next few years,” it said, while adding that
commodity prices will continue “substantially above” the levels
of the past 10 years.
Comparing average prices for 2008 to 2017 with
1998 to 2007, it said beef and pork could be 20 percent higher;
wheat, maize and skim milk powder 40-60 percent; butter and oilseeds
more than 60 percent, and vegetable oils more than 80 percent.
The report cited changing diets, urbanization,
rising po-pulations and economic growth as underpinning demand in
developing countries.
The most-threatened countries listed by the FAO
are Eritrea, Niger, the Comoros, Botswana, Haiti and Liberia.
They are followed in order of severity by
Burundi, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Zambia, the
Central African Republic, Mozambique, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau,
Madagascar, Malawi, Cambodia, North Korea, Rwanda and Kenya.
-- AFP
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