Food Security

Hunger on the agenda

Ahead of the summit in Rome (beginning of June), UN’s Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO) has made a new report ”Soaring Foodprices: Facts, Perspectives, Impacts and Actions Required”

According to the report, the price on e.g. maize has increased by 83 per cent from September 2007 to February 2008. During the first three months of 2008 – from January to March – the international market prices on all main foodstuffs have increased to the highest level of the past 50 years.

”Food is no longer a cheap commodity. The increasing food prices will undermine millions of people’s living conditions – the very people who are already struggling for their existence and cannot afford their daily food,” it is written in the FAO-report, which has been prepared in cooperation with OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Agricultural support

”The food crisis is a unique opportunity to emphasize how important it is to support agriculture. This is what we hope the summit can do, says Christian Friis Bach, International Director of DanChurchAid.

Christian Friis Bach adds that it will be very expensive if the world is to secure that enough food will be produced during the coming decades.

”There is an immense need to increase investments. It is simply necessary to spend more money,” Christian Friis Bach says.

Development cause for concern

The FAO-report states, that price increases is ”a big concern to the development” of the most exposed and vulnerable groups in the poor countries. At the end of 2008 they will have to pay four times as much for imported food compared to the prices in 2000.

Besides providing documentation for how much the prices have increased, the report also recommends what to do; It is necessary to provide immediate humanitarian help to the most exposed, and at the same time some countries must change their export policies, and we must e.g. also re-think biofuels.

“The heavily increasing demand for biofuel has like no other commodity during the last decades been a contributing factor for making the global market prices on food increase”, the report says, and it suggests that alternatives be found for the so-called biofuels.

Especially needed are long-term and sustainable solutions among others by strengthening the agricultural production and the economic development as well and making them more efficient.

Consequences of the food crisis

The poorest and weakest people already feel the consequences of the global food crisis.

Lars Jørgensen, Coordinator of DanChurchAid’s work on the Horn of Africa, has just returned from Ethiopia, where the prices of corn and other base crops have increased dramatically, while the prices of cattle have decreased.

”People sell cattle in order to buy corn. A clear sign of a future hunger disaster. Usually, the farmers will sell their corn on the market when prices are high, but they have no corn to sell.”

Linda Nordahl Jakobsen ( lin@dca.dk )