The UN Food and AgricultureOrganization says there's growing evidence that the fight against world hunger couldbe lost. It estimates nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from hungerand malnutrition compared with 825 million about 10 years ago.
Expertsfrom the FAO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development opena two-day meeting in Paris Tuesday to discuss the problem. Joseph Schmidhuber,head of the FAO's Global Perspectives Unit, spoke from Rome about the growingnumber of people labeled as hungry or malnourished.
"We'veseen first a stagnation in the number of under nourished people and thenactually we saw quite an increase. And we expect a further increase due to thefinancial and economic crisis. The first increase was essentially an increasethat reduced implicit incomes through higher food prices and the second one isan increase that will reduce explicit incomes and purchasing power through thefinancial and economic crisis," he says.
TheParis meeting will look for long-term solutions. "The meeting will focus oninvesting in agriculture and food security. What we sense now is an urgent needto step up investment in agriculture in order to avoid the situation as we hadin the early 1980s," he says.
Theeconomic crisis of the 1980s, triggered in part by a debt crisis, brought asharp downturn in investment in agriculture. Schmidhuber says that resulted in"a reduction of production and stagnation in the fight against hunger."
LastJune, in Rome, international donors held an emergency meeting in Rome onsoaring food prices and widespread food shortages. Asked whether anythingsubstantial has come from that meeting, he says, "What we've seen is actuallythat international prices went down considerably. There's no doubt about that."However, what did not happen in many countries was an equal decline in nationalprices. In fact, in some cases food prices actually rose.
"Oneof the problems we see as an organization is that we saw enormous pledges in2008 in the meeting?but there was relatively little follow-up in terms ofactual investment. So, we saw pledges to the tune of $26 billion and wesaw?actual money coming forward to the tune of $2 billion."
Willthe Paris meeting be any different? Schmidhuber says, "We don't expect that tobring about the big action. But we think it's a very important stepping stonetowards a world food summit that we will hopefully have in November 2009. Andnow we gradually want to prepare that process and one of the steppingstones?will be this meeting in Paris."
Inwarning about the growing hunger problem, the FAO says there are about a dozenso-called "left behind" countries.
"Thereare a number of countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and also in SouthAsia, that have not made progress?in terms of fighting hunger. At the sametime, these are countries with still very high population growth rates? Theyhave relatively limited agricultural resources, limited land. And they'veexhausted much of the land. They have very limited non-agricultural resources.And therefore, we don't see much possibility for them to get out of thedoldrums unless there is much more investment and much more investment inproductivity," he says.
These countries include Niger, Maliand Burkina Faso.