NEW YORK, 18 February 2011: Faced with soaring food prices for the second time in three years, senior United Nations experts Friday called for greater investment in agriculture from both the public and private sectors to increase smallholder (småbøndernes) productivity.
– Policy-related solutions are also required to increase the longer-term resilience (modstandsdygtighed overfor klima m.v.) of global agriculture to allow greater levels of supply to markets as demand grows, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior Economist Jamie Morrison told a meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
– Particular attention is needed to increase smallholder productivity growth and to their increased integration into markets, he added, noting that in many countries many smallholders are semi-subsistence producers but net food buyers (dyrker til selvforsyning, men må alligevel købe mad).
– Support to ensure more farmers are willing and able to generate marketable surpluses (dyrke så meget, at de kan sælge af det) will be critical in meeting increased demands in the future. To achieve this increased investment is paramount (går foran alt), noted he.
He said public sector investment is needed to establish the basic conditions for productivity growth and this will require a reversal of the decline in aid flows to agriculture and increased national budget allocations, but most of the needed investment will have to come from the private sector in national economies.
David Nabarro, coordinator of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s High-Level Task Force on Global Food Security, cited under-investment among four challenges in the overall food security situation.
The other three challenges are soaring prices, weather-related disasters such as droughts, floods and fires, and political changes and instability that are disrupting food supply chains.
– A point that we have been maintaining now for the last 30 years is that there is systematic and serious under-investment in agriculture and food security and that is a problem now, but it will be a much greater problem as we move towards 2015, he later told a news conference.
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