Please manage the food better – Too many people still go hungry
JOHANNESBURG, 24 June 2010 (IRIN): A new global architecture to govern food security is urgently needed to reduce the number of hungry people, and predict and prevent another food price crisis like the one that took the world by surprise in 2006-08.
Shenggen Fen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank, urged leaders of the G8 industrialised countries and G20 emerging countries, who will be meeting in Canada for two days from 25 June, to focus on this issue.
– The existing governing systems, and even countries, failed to predict the food price crisis in 2007-08, and ever more people have been going hungry since then, he told IRIN.
The food price crisis and the recession that followed pushed the number of malnourished men, women and children to more than one billion in 2009, according to UN agencies, and the figure is still growing.
“Hunger has been much more pervasive than poverty … If past trends continue, global food security will deteriorate even further,” warned an IFPRI report on meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger, called “Business As Unusual”, written by Fen and released on 23 June.
– While food prices have dropped, incomes because of the recession have been reduced by a much higher rate, said Holger Matthey, an economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The G8 countries promised to tackle global hunger at their 2009 meeting in L’Aquila, Italy: – But we do not know how much of that money has come through, said Fen, who proposed setting up a tracking system to monitor funds for reducing hunger.
IFPRI uses its Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) to monitor funding for agriculture in Africa. – We could maybe expand this system to cover global flows, Fen suggested.
After the 2006-08 crisis, when staples such as maize, rice and wheat climbed to their highest prices in 30 years, many donor countries, aid agencies and analysts suggested that the existing Committee on World Food Security (CFS) be reformed.
The CFS is a technical committee of the FAO, and serves as a forum in the UN system for the review and follow-up of policies on world food security, food production, nutrition, and physical and economic access to food.
Læs videre på http://www.IRINnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89596
