Toyako, Japan - The rich G8 nations have failed to keep their pledges in the fight against world hunger. Worse: while the world food crisis increases the suffering in poor countries, the major industrial states at their summit in Toyako, in northern Japan, look like falling way behind what they have already agreed to do, critics argue.

"The current draft communique is an outrage," warns Max Lawson, senior policy advisor at Oxfam.

"Whether it refers to aid to Africa, education or health, the text shows that leaders are attempting to water down their previous financial commitments, or even reneging on them altogether."

But at least, he said, "there is still time for the Japanese presidency to show some leadership and turn things around" at the summit starting Monday, during which the G8 leaders will meet with African representatives, World Bank president Robert Zoellick and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

"Not only are the G8 failing to meet their promises, they are now failing to acknowledge they ever made them," warns Lawson.

Three years ago, at their summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G8 agreed to boost aid to developing countries by 50 billion dollars annually by 2010. At least half of this extra money should go to Africa, they said.

But the body led by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan which keeps a check on the pledges being fulfilled reckons that 40 billion dollars in aid promised to Africa has failed to materialise.

"The only promises that matter are the ones you keep," Annan has warned in making an appeal for the upcoming summit to make good on what the G8 has failed to come up with.

Oxfam says that Germany, France and Japan are the worst for not keeping their word.

The German government counters that shortly before the summit it decided to increase its development aid spending for 2009 by 800 million euros.

However, the 0.37 per cent of gross domestic product quota set aside for such aid is little affected by this. And it remains unclear how Germany will reach the 0.51 per cent promised by 2010.

The DATA aid organisation has calculated that the G8 countries managed to increase their aid for sub-Sahara states since 2004 by just 3 billion dollars to 18.8 billion instead of the promised 25 billion.

"G8 leaders seem to have quickly forgotten what they pledged to do when it comes to helping the world's poorest," says Lawson.

"At a time when oil and food prices are skyrocketing through the developing world, it is not the time to shy away from important pledges."

Appearing at the summit to give the G8 leaders a sharp reminder of their past pledges will be celebrity campaigners from the world of pop music Bob Geldof and Bono.

"It is tragic and absurd that people are still going hungry in the 21st century," Geldof has said before the meeting. "I cannot stand the idea that a food crisis born out of high energy prices and increasing global prosperity is starving the super-poor in Africa.

"(Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo) Fukuda is the chair of the G8 group and Japan is the second largest economy on the planet. It is his and Japan's responsibility this year to care for the hungry and ill.

"Given the resource crises of the world at this moment, we are dismayed at the low level of expectation emanating from the table of leaders of the wealthiest economies on the planet. It's about time their actions lived up to their perhaps misplaced stature."

Bono, a founder member of DATA and the ONE campaign, said: "in order to combat the world hunger crisis, we must invest in efficiency and productivity in Africa's agriculture."

World Bank President Zoellick for his part has issued a stern warning over the dramatic consequences for the poorest countries of the growing energy and food crisis.

An immediate injection of 10 billion dollars was needed, he said, in order to counter the effects on the world's worst-hit.

And Oxfam spokesman Takumo Yamada gave a bleak warning: "Rapidly rising costs of oil and food might cause pain in rich countries - but it is shattering people's lives and entire economies in developing countries.

"Having to choose between eating or taking life-saving medicines has become the impossible choice for millions in Africa.

"G8 action on poverty is needed now more than ever - but instead they are cutting aid and burning food to fill their cars."

by Anna Quindlen

Winter flits in and out of New York City in the late fall, hitching a ride on the wind that whips the Hudson River. One cold morning not long ago, just as day was breaking, six men began to shift beneath their blankets under a stone arch up a rise from the water. In the shadow of the newest castle-in-the-air skyscraper midwifed by the Baron Trump, they gathered their possessions. An hour later they had vanished, an urban mirage.

There's a new kind of homelessness in the city, and a new kind of hunger, and a new kind of need and humiliation, but it has managed to stay as invisible as those sleepers were by sunup. "What we're seeing are many more working families on the brink of eviction," says Mary Brosnahan, who runs the Coalition for the Homeless. "They fall behind on the rent, and that's it, they're on the street." Adds Julia Erickson, the executive director of City Harvest, which distributes food to soup kitchens and food pantries, "Look at the Rescue Mission on Lafayette Street. They used to feed single men, often substance abusers, homeless. Now you go in and there are bike messengers, clerks, deli workers, dishwashers, people who work on cleaning crews. Soup kitchens have been buying booster seats and highchairs. You never used to see young kids at soup kitchens."

America is a country that now sits atop the precarious latticework of myth. It is the myth that work provides rewards, that working people can support their families. It's a myth that has become so divorced from reality that it might as well begin with the words "Once upon a time." According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1.6 million New Yorkers, or the equivalent of the population of Philadelphia, suffer from "food insecurity," which is a fancy way of saying they don't have enough to eat. Some are the people who come in at night and clean those skyscrapers that glitter along the river. Some pour coffee and take care of the aged parents of the people who live in those buildings. The American Dream for the well-to-do grows from the bowed backs of the working poor, who too often have to choose between groceries and rent.

Even if you've never been to the Rescue Mission, all the evidence for this is in a damning new book called "The Betrayal of Work" by Beth Shulman, a book that should be required reading for every presidential candidate and member of Congress. According to Shulman, even in the go-go '90s one out of every four American workers made less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government's poverty level for a family of four. Many, if not most, of these workers have no health care, sick pay or retirement provisions.

We salve our consciences, Shulman writes, by describing these people as "low skilled," as though they're not important or intelligent enough to deserve more. But low-skilled workers today are better educated than ever before, and they constitute the linchpin of American industry. When politicians crow that happy days are here again because jobs are on the rise, it's these jobs they're really talking about. Five of the 10 occupations expected to grow big in the next decade are in the lowest-paying job groups. And before we sit back and decide that that's just the way it is, it's instructive to consider the rest of the world. While the bottom 10 percent of American workers earn just 37 percent of our median wage, according to Shulman, their counterparts in other industrialized countries earn upwards of 60 percent. And those are countries that provide health care and child care, which cuts the economic pinch considerably.

In America we console ourselves with the bootstrap myth, that anyone can rise, even those who work two jobs and still have to visit food pantries to feed their families. It is a beloved myth now more than ever, because the working poor have become ever more unsympathetic. Almost 40 years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, a family with a car and a Dutch Colonial in the suburbs felt prosperous and, in the face of the president's call to action, magnanimous. Poverty seemed far away, in the shanties of the South or the worst pockets of urban blight. Today that same family may well feel impoverished, overwhelmed by credit-card debt, a second mortgage and the cost of the stuff that has become the backbone of American life. When the middle class feels poor, the poor have little chance for change, or even recognition. Does anyone think twice about the woman who turns down the spread on the hotel bed?

A living wage, affordable health care and housing, the bedrock understanding that it's morally wrong to prosper through the casual exploitation of those who make your prosperity possible. It's a tall order, I suppose. The lucky thing for many Americans is that they don't even have to see or think about it. The office hallways get mopped somehow, the shelves get stocked at the stores. And on Thanksgiving Day, children will be pushed up to the table for a free meal in a church basement or a soup kitchen, with the understanding that that is the point of the holiday--a day of plenty in a life of want.

UNITY (June 29): The Unity Barn Raisers were honored June 9, in New York City with the 2007 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award for Leadership in the Fight Against Hunger and Poverty.

World Hunger Year selected the Barn Raisers for the award for the creation of the Community Farm Share Program, which has developed a model for towns to support local farms and provide fresh, healthy produce to residents at risk of being malnourished due to reliance on food relief systems such as food pantries.

“This program is not designed to compete with or replace traditional food pantries; it could never do that," said Tess Woods, Unity Barn Raisers’ executive director. "The food pantries are necessary. They provide a lot of people, who would otherwise go hungry, with food year-round. Because of the short shelf life of fresh produce, this is usually not available in the pantries. The Farm Share Program helps to nutritionally supplement food relief offered through local food pantries.

“This award is shared by us with the towns of Freedom, Knox, Montville, Thorndike, Troy and Unity," said Woods. "The selectors, budget committees and voters of these towns saw the potential power and impact of the Community Farm Share program on their communities and partnered with UBR to make this trial program work. We are especially thankful to and impressed with the towns of Freedom, Knox, Montville and Thorndike for figuring out a way to work with their local farmers to keep this extremely valuable program going once the grant funding ran out.”

Unity Barn Raisers is celebrating its 12-year anniversary. The nonprofit community organization with open membership works to enhance small-town character and the rural environment, while nurturing a thriving, community-based economy.

UBR has programs and activities to support downtown vitality, rural vitality, and community health and wellness in the Unity area and, as a past recipient of the Maine Community Foundation's Noyce Award for Nonprofit Excellence, serves as a model for other communities throughout Maine and the nation.

Connie Levett
May 20, 2008

IN GHANA, there is a running joke that they are all becoming Italians - they can't afford rice anymore and are eating processed pasta from Italy. These are not the poorest of the poor, these are working urban Ghanaians, according to Amrote Abdella, who runs projects to break the hunger cycle in Africa.

In Ethiopia, the price of wheat has trebled in the past year. Across the developing world, the global food crisis is biting higher and higher up the economic food chain as grain prices are driven up by a trifecta of climate change, growing demand for animal fodder and the use of grains for biofuels.

Rural Africans living on less than a dollar a day can do nothing to influence these factors, but there are ways to escape the poverty and chronic hunger trap, said Ms Abdella, an Ethiopian aid worker with the New York-based The Hunger Project, established in 1977.

She is in Australia to raise awareness about the non-government organisation's microfinance program, which empowers women to break the cycle.

She said 80 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa's food is grown by women, but they get access to only 7 per cent of agricultural assistance and 10 per cent of land. "They don't have ownership rights to land or access to credit," she said.

The African Woman Food Farmer Initiative is an attempt to shift that balance.

"The goal is to set up a government-recognised rural bank that is owned and led by women," Ms Abdella said.

"[We believe] women are more careful with their spending, they are more conscious of needing to provide for the family than men."

Since the women's initiative started in 1999 in Senegal, the organisation has established 103 rural centres in eight African countries. The women's bank is part of a wider "epicentre strategy", in which a cluster of villages work together to meet their basic needs - educational, maternal health and HIV/AIDS care, animal health and agricultural.

Since 2000, 95,326 loans totalling $US5.7 million have been issued. Seventeen communities now have self-reliant government-recognised banks (no longer requiring donor funds) run by women, which fund ongoing community development. Not one of the banks has folded.

The timetable for self-reliance is about five years. "We set the vision for what they want," she said. "We ask them is poverty and hunger something you feel you can tackle and change?"

Only when the villagers accept the possibility of that change can the project move forward.

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world's poor suffer most.

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; A01

The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.

In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.

At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.

Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months' supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.

"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan -- they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.

"We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer. . . . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."
Beyond Hunger

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world's poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men -- distributors, processors, even governments -- but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.

The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.

To quell unrest, countries including Indonesia are digging deep to boost food subsidies. The U.N. World Food Program has warned of an alarming surge in hunger in areas as far-flung as North Korea and West Africa. The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.

"This crisis could result in a cascade of others . . . and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.
The New Normal

Prices for some crops -- such as wheat -- have already begun to descend off their highs. As farmers rush to plant more wheat now that profit prospects have climbed, analysts predict that prices may come down as much as 30 percent in the coming months. But that would still leave a year-over-year price hike of 45 percent. Few believe prices will go back to where they were in early 2006, suggesting that the world must cope with a new reality of more expensive food.

People worldwide are coping in different ways. For the 1 billion living on less than a dollar a day, it is a matter of survival. In a mud hut on the Sahara's edge, Manthita Sou, a 43-year-old widow in the Mauritanian desert village of Maghleg, is confronting wheat prices that are up 67 percent on local markets in the past year. Her solution: stop eating bread. Instead, she has downgraded to cheaper foods, such as sorghum, a dark grain widely consumed by the world's poorest people. But sorghum has jumped 20 percent in the past 12 months. Living on the 50 cents a day she earns weaving textiles to support a family of three, her answer has been to cut out breakfast, drink tea for lunch and ration a small serving of soupy sorghum meal for family dinners. "I don't know how long we can survive like this," she said.

Countries that have driven food demand in recent years are now grappling with the cost of their own success -- rising prices. Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40 percent of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high. In the southern province of Guangdong, there are reports of grain hoarding; and in Hong Kong, consumers have stripped store shelves of bags of rice.

Liu Yinhua, a retired factory worker who lives in the port city of Ningbo on China's east coast, said her family of three still eats the same things, including pork ribs, fish and vegetables. But they are eating less of it.

"Almost everything is more expensive now, even normal green vegetables," said Liu, 53. "The level of our quality of life is definitely reduced."

In India, the government recently scrapped all import duties on cooking oils and banned exports of non-basmati rice. As in many parts of the developing world, the impact in India is being felt the most among the urban poor who have fled rural life to live in teeming slums. At a dusty and nearly empty market in one New Delhi neighborhood this week, shopkeeper Manjeet Singh, 52, said people at the market have started hoarding because of fear that rice and oil will run out.

"If one doesn't have enough to fill one's own stomach, then what's the use of an economic boom in exports?" he said, looking sluggish in the scorching afternoon sun. He said his customers were asking for cheaper goods, like groundnut oil instead of soybean oil.

Even wealthy nations are being forced to adjust to a new normal. In Japan, a country with a distinct cultural aversion to cheaper, genetically modified grains, manufacturers are risking public backlash by importing them for use in processed foods for the first time. Inflation in the 15-country zone that uses the euro -- which includes France, Germany, Spain and Italy -- hit 3.6 percent in March, the highest rate since the currency was adopted almost a decade ago and well above the European Central Bank's target of 2.0 percent. Food and oil prices were mostly to blame.

In the United States, experts say consumers are scaling down on quality and scaling up on quantity if it means a better unit price. In the meat aisles of major grocery stores, said Phil Lempert, a supermarket analyst, steaks are giving way to chopped beef and people used to buying fresh blueberries are moving to frozen. Some are even trying to grow their own vegetables.

"A bigger pinch than ever before," said Pat Carroll, a retiree in Congress Heights. "I don't ever remember paying $3 for a loaf of bread."
Ill-Equipped Markets

The root cause of price surges varies from crop to crop. But the crisis is being driven in part by an unprecedented linkage of the food chain.

A big reason for higher wheat prices, for instance, is the multiyear drought in Australia, something that scientists say may become persistent because of global warming. But wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy.

This year, at least a fifth and perhaps a quarter of the U.S. corn crop will be fed to ethanol plants. As food and fuel fuse, it has presented a boon to American farmers after years of stable prices. But it has also helped spark the broader food-price shock.

"If you didn't have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today," said Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. "It doesn't mean it's the sole driver. Prices would be higher than we saw earlier in this decade because world grain supplies are tighter now than earlier in the decade. But we've introduced a new demand into the market."

In fact, many economists now say food prices should have climbed much higher much earlier.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world seemed to shrink with rapidly opening markets, surging trade and improved communication and transportation technology. Given new market efficiencies and the wide availability of relatively cheap food, the once-common practice of hoarding grains to protect against the kind of shortfall the world is seeing now seemed more and more archaic. Global grain reserves plunged.

Yet there was one big problem. The global food trade never became the kind of well-honed machine that has made the price of manufactured goods such as personal computers and flat-screen TVs increasingly similar worldwide. With food, significant subsidies and other barriers meant to protect farmers -- particularly in Europe, the United States and Japan -- have distorted the real price of food globally, economists say, preventing the market from normal price adjustments as global demand has climbed.

If market forces had played a larger role in food trade, some now argue, the world would have had more time to adjust to more gradually rising prices.

"The international food trade didn't undergo the same kind of liberalization as other trade," said Richard Feltes, senior vice president of MF Global, a futures brokerage. "We can see now that the world has largely failed in its attempt to create an integrated food market."

In recent years, there has been a great push to liberalize food markets worldwide -- part of what is known as the "Doha round" of world trade talks -- but resistance has come from both the developed and developing worlds. Perhaps more than any other sector, nations have a visceral desire to protect their farmers, and thusly, their food supply. The current food crisis is causing advocates on both sides to dig in.

Consider, for instance, the French.

The European Union doles out about $41 billion a year in agriculture subsidies, with France getting the biggest share, about $8.2 billion. The 27-nation bloc also has set a target for biofuels to supply 10 percent of transportation fuel needs by 2020 to combat global warming.

The French, whose farmers over the years have become addicted to generous government handouts, argue that agriculture subsidies must be continued and even increased in order to encourage more food production, especially with looming shortages.

Last week, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier warned E.U. officials against "too much trust in the free market."

"We must not leave the vital issue of feeding people," he said, "to the mercy of market laws and international speculation."

By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK, Apr 21 (IPS) - Food prices are continuing to skyrocket throughout Asia, causing many governments to intervene to stabilise domestic rice prices for fear of acute shortages in the future and social unrest.
And as the price of rice skyrockets across the region more and more people are slipping back into poverty.

"The rising food prices across Asia are threatening to undo the economic miracle of the last two decades," Paul Risely, regional spokesman for the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), told IPS in an interview. "It’s a silent crisis, a silent tsunami that is tearing through the region, with devastating results."

Rice -- the region’s staple -- is the main concern. It has increased in price almost every week now since the beginning of the year. Many exporting nations have implemented bans and restrictions on rice exports to dampen the local prices.

Panic buying, rationing and hoarding are increasing alarmingly, fuelled by fears that rice and other foodstuffs may run out soon in many Asian countries, despite repeated government calls for calm. In Bangladesh, and parts of South-east Asia in particular, panic buying of rice has been reported for fear that stocks in the stores and markets will run out .

Aid agencies working with the poor, including the WFP, are increasingly worried that if this situation continues they will soon have to cut back on their food assistance programmes.

"Malnutrition is almost certainly going to rise significantly in many of the poorest parts of Asia," ActionAid food specialist John Samuel told IPS.

Already the number of people at risk of hunger or starvation has more than doubled, according to the WFP. In Nepal, the number of people who are in danger of starving if food prices remain high has doubled to eight million, or a third of the population, in the last six months.

Throughout Asia there are mounting signs of discontent and fears for the future as rice prices soar.

In Bangladesh, over the past two weeks there have been long queues of people every day at government stores waiting to buy the heavily subsidised five kg packs of rice and other basic commodities, according to reports.

From the Philippines to Pakistan, from China to Indonesia, the fears are the same -- food shortages and hunger. "As prices go up in the world market many millions of people across Asia will face food shortages and possible starvation," said Risely.

In Thailand, cheap government supported packets of rice are on sale, but the major supermarket stores have rationed their sales to three 5 kg bags per person to prevent panic buying, depleting their stocks too quickly.

Thailand’s commerce minister, Mingkuan Sangsuwan, has announced a government sponsored cut of around 10 percent in all retail rice prices from next week after meeting senior executives of major supermarket chains, rice millers and packers associations. The scheme will end in two months time, when the new rice harvest will ensure supply because of higher yields expected from the crop, according to a spokesman for the Thai Rice Millers’ Association.

"It is the poor that get hit the hardest from food-price inflation, simply because food takes up almost all of their incomes," said Shamika Sirimanne, a development policy expert with the U.N. Economic and Social Committee for Asia and the Pacific based in Bangkok "The biggest burden, of course, is on the women who are responsible for putting food on the table," she added.

"Inflation will also erode the real wages of the poorer segments of the labour force and those making a living in the informal sector, making it doubly difficult for them to cope because now they have to pay a lot more for their food, but the purchasing power of their salaries has declined, so they have a lot less to spend," she explained.

It is certainly the urban dwellers in Asia who are suffering most from the latest food price rises, according to WFP’s Risely. ‘’It is this which is making most Asian governments nervous, for they fear that the soaring rice prices will fuel political and social unrest.’’

"The massive food riots in the Haiti capital recently are a wake up call for all Asian governments," said ActionAid’s Samuel. "If immediate measures like protective price mechanisms are not taken, there is likely to be food protests here too. There is a social crisis looming which will become a major political problem, especially for Asia's democracies."

Already in Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, which will all have elections in the coming year, there are reports of substantial unrest and growing fears that the anger against rising food prices could spill over into the streets soon.

Malaysia’s ruling coalition’s massive setback in the March elections was attributed by post-election surveys to surging prices of fuel and food.

Even in more controlled societies, like China and Vietnam, there have been reports of small-scale demonstrations and strikes against rising food prices and shrinking job opportunities. In China, there have been frequent unreported demonstrations in many main urban centres over the last six months, according to a western diplomat in Beijing who did not want to be identified.

"There is clearly a potential for further worker unrest resulting from the worsening inflation," said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, a non-government organisation (NGO) which promotes workers’ rights in China.

Many experts believe the rice crisis was waiting to happen. Annual world rice consumption has been higher than production for more than ten years, according to Vichai Sriprasert, president of Riceland International, a major Thai rice exporter. As a result, international stocks have been steadily depleted. The only answer, according to most experts, is greater investment in agriculture.

"This is a crisis that has been brewing for years," said Samuel. "Although there has been substantial economic growth right across the region, this has been in the industrial and service sectors, investment in the agriculture has stagnated or even declined in real terms."

"Unless there is concerted investment in agriculture in Asian countries, food price hikes will become a perennial problem. This includes investment in irrigation, better water management, improved storage facilities for harvested grain, soft-loans to farmers and comprehensive marketing and delivery systems, and land reform," he said.

(CNN) -- It appears the global food crisis can be averted. The solution? The humble potato.

That's the assertion of the International Potato Center -- yes, there is one -- in Lima, Peru. It held a conference this month about the potato being the "food of the future."

But it's not the only one hailing the qualities of the dirty spud.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato to raise awareness of the tuber's importance in addressing global hunger, poverty, and threats to the environment.

Can the potato really do all of that? According to the United Nations, yes.

Potato farming is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labor is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world, the FAO says.

Potatoes are nutritious, too: They have the highest protein content of root and tuber crops (around 2.1 percent), half the daily recommended intake of vitamin C, and a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium.

In declaring 2008 the year of the potato, the FAO said it wanted to focus world attention on the role the potato can play in providing food security and alleviating poverty.

It noted the potato -- the Number 4 food crop worldwide -- is already a staple food in the diet of the world population.

Back at the International Potato Center in Peru, where potatoes were first cultivated 8,000 years ago, they're trying to provide farmers with poor resources some help in cultivating more and better potatoes.

The center says it's looking for ways to produce potato varieties that require less water for growing and have greater resistance to pests and climate change.

Whether fried, roasted, boiled, mashed, baked or scalloped, potatoes already please palates around the world. Now, they may just be doing their part to save the world.

By EDITH M. LEDERER

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — A rapidly escalating global food crisis has reached emergency proportions and threatens to wipe out seven years of progress in the fight against poverty, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Monday.

He called for short-term emergency measures in many regions to meet urgent food needs and avoid starvation and urged longer-term efforts to significantly increase production of food grains.

The international community needs "to take urgent and concerted action in order to avoid the larger political and security implications of this growing crisis," Ban told international finance and trade officials who came to a U.N. meeting following weekend talks in Washington.

Ban's appeal came as President Bush ordered the release of $200 million in emergency aid to help nations where surging food prices have deepened hunger woes and sparked violent protests. The money will come from a reserve fund known as the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the move will help address the impact of rising commodity prices on U.S. emergency food aid programs and help meet the unanticipated food needs of struggling countries in Africa and elsewhere.

Bush's move came one day after World Bank President Robert Zoellick's appealed to governments to quickly provide the U.N. World Food Program with $500 million in emergency aid that it needs by May 1.

Zoellick said the international community has "to put our money where our mouth is" to deal with rapidly rising food prices that have caused hunger and deadly violence in several countries.

Ban said the recent steep rise in food prices "has already raised the cost of WFP's needs to maintain its current operations from $500 million to $755 million."

WFP, the world's largest humanitarian agency, issued an "extraordinary emergency appeal" for the $500 million last month, saying the money was needed by May 1 to avoid cutting rations to some of the world's most impoverished regions. The Rome-based agency said its funding gap was growing weekly.

"The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions," Ban said.

"The World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low income countries deeper into poverty," he said.

Ban echoed Zoellick in warning that that the food crisis "could mean seven lost years in the fight against worldwide poverty."

U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes offered a more cautious assessment.

While it is "a very serious problem which has global ramifications," Holmes said, "I think we should be a little bit careful of being too alarmist about it and suggesting there are mass problems around the corner, or that it's a global emergency we have to solve with every detail tomorrow."

He stressed, however, that the $500 million sought by WFP did not cover potential future needs, including those "that might arise from price rises ... or if the number of desperately hungry people in a country doubles."

The United Nations is at a midpoint in its campaign to reduce global poverty and improve living standards of the world's bottom billion people. The Millennium Development Goals, adopted at a U.N. summit in 2000, include cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015.

The World Bank's Development Committee urged both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund "to provide timely policy and financial support ... to countries dealing with negative shocks including from energy and food shortages," said Mexican finance official Ricardo Ochoa, who spoke on behalf of the committee.

IMF Deputy Managing Director Murilo Portugal said emerging markets and developing countries have shown resilience but their growth prospects have moderated and inflation risks have increased.

"For many countries, containing inflation and addressing vulnerabilities will remain a key priority," Portugal said.

SIAKA MOMOH and Cordelia Smart

There is hunger across the globe, Nigeria inclusive. Concerned stakeholders have made this issue which touches on humanity a sing-song. They all want something done urgently if we must avoid disaster.

Only recently, FAO said in its World development Report 2008; Agriculture and Development that "36 countries are in crisis as a result of higher food prices and will require external assistance". It noted that in many of these countries, food insecurity has been worsened by conflict, floods, or extreme weather.

Agriculture is an important factor in Nigeria. It is no news that before oil, this sector was the pillar of Nigeria's economy. Today whether we admit or not, it is the backbone of the rural economy, generating more than a third of gross domestic product (GDP), with the crop sector (especially cassava, yam, sorghum, maize and millet) contributing the largest share of the agricultural GDP, followed by livestock, fisheries and forestry sub-sectors. Agriculture also provides over 70 per cent of rural employment.

But growth and competitiveness in the agricultural sector have been disappointing. Over the past two decades, value added per capita in agriculture has risen by less than one per cent per year. Food production gains have not kept pace with population growth, resulting in rising food imports and declining levels of national food self-sufficiency.

Business Day's investigation in Markets in Lagos in the last one month corroborates the fear of an impending food crisis being expressed worldwide. Prices of essential food stuff are increasing by the day. Some two weeks back, Business Day's visit to Daleko market in Isolo, Lagos State indicated that 50kg of Royal Stallion rice sold for N7500; 50kg of Mama Africa brand sold at N6500. The tomato brand sold at the same price; Special rice for N6900 while Aroso sold for N7000. Currently however, these prices have shot up and there are indications that prices will continue to move up, if we go by trends in the last couple of weeks. Royal Stallion now sells N8100, an 8 per cent increase, Mama Africa N7800 an 8 per cent increase, Tomato N8200 a whopping 26.1 per jump, Aroso N8700 - a 24.2 per cent increase, and Special N8500 - a 23.1 per cent increase!

Again our investigation revealed that 50 kg bag of Mama Royale sold at the rate of N9000 and Mama Gold N7500 while 50kg bag of Caprice Gold sold for N8000 two weeks back. Mama Royale now sells for N9500 which means consumers are now paying 5.5 per cent more for a bag of this brand of rice. The upward change in price is more pronounced with Mama Gold which now sells for N9500, a 26.6 per cent increase in price!

Our investigation revealed that price of sugar is on the upward move. A 50 kg of sugar which sold N5000 some three/four weeks back now sells for between N5600 and N5800 depending on what part of Lagos you are buying from. Same trend prevails with wheat flour and vegetable oil with housewives now asking their husbands for increase in the house-keeping allowance.
In a speech recently, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick called for a "new deal" to combat world hunger and malnutrition through a combination of emergency aid and long-term efforts to boost agricultural productivity in developing countries.

The "New Deal for a Global Food Policy" is part of a suite of initiatives Zoellick outlined to advance development in the face of skyrocketing food and oil prices. He also called for a global trade deal to be agreed as soon as possible, detailed an initiative to help countries manage their wealth earned from high energy and mineral prices in a more inclusive way, and encouraged sovereign wealth funds to create a "One Percent Solution" for equity investment in Africa.
The World Bank will nearly double agricultural assistance to N93.6 billion in Africa. Zoellick also urged wealthy nations to help the UN's World Food Program meet some N58.5 billion in emergency food needs.

"The United States, the European Union, Japan and other OECD countries must act now to fill this gap - or many more people will suffer and starve," Zoellick said in an address sponsored by the Center for Global Development in Washington.

Zoellick said the "New Deal for a Global Food Policy" is needed to combat the "forgotten" Millennium Development Goal of overcoming malnutrition. Only about a tenth of the resources directed at HIV/AIDS go to fight malnutrition, which causes 3.5 million deaths a year in children under 5 and has long-lasting impacts on health and achievement. He said hunger and malnutrition "are a cause, not just a result, of poverty".

The New Deal requires a shift from traditional food aid to a broader concept of food and nutrition assistance, such as cash or vouchers that can help build local food markets and farm production,. and create a "Green Revolution" for Sub-Saharan Africa, said Zoellick.

"This New Deal should focus not only on hunger and nutrition, access to food and its supply, but also the interconnections with energy, yields, climate change, investment, the marginalization of women and others, and economic resiliency and growth," said Zoellick.

"Food policy needs to gain the attention of the highest political levels, because no one country or group can meet these interconnected challenges."

Zoellick said the World Bank Group can help by:
• Backing emergency measures that support the poor while encouraging incentives to produce and harvest food;
• Offering access to technology and science to boost yields;
• Helping countries counter weather-related risks, such as drought;
• Facilitating land-titling, local currency financing, working capital, distribution and logistics, and support for services on which farmers rely.
"Income gains in agriculture have three times the power in overcoming poverty than increases in other sectors, and 75 percent of the world's poor are rural, with most involved in farming," said Zoellick.

Trade and food prices
Zoellick said the time was "now or never" to break the impasse in global trade talks. A "fairer and more open trading system" would encourage developing country farmers to expand production, he said.

"The poor need lower food prices now. But the world's agricultural trading system is stuck in the past. If ever there was a time to cut distorting agricultural subsidies and open markets for food imports, it must be now."

An accord would give developing countries, big and small, more opportunities to become more productive and lower prices through trade. It would also infuse confidence in an economic system stressed by financial anxiety, he said.

However, "powerful voices across the political spectrum, including in my own country, are calling for, rationalizing, protectionism," Zoellick said. "This economic isolationism signals a defeatism that will reap the losses, not the gains, of globalization."

The trade talks are also a "critical test" for striking a global deal on climate change. "If negotiators of 150 economies cannot manage the political tradeoffs of the Doha Round to reap the clear benefits, it does not auger well for bringing developed and developing countries together on a new accord for climate change."

The talk about free trade has been on for ages. The argument is made by the North that the alternative to free trade is poverty, that our wealth is based on the breath and choice of the markets we can sell to or buy from. You are told the fastest growing developing countries - in East Asia in particular, have been those involved in international trade. China is often cited as one country that has successfully lifted millions of her citizens out poverty.

But we must ask if there is a level playing ground in the trade arena. Does the trade really benefit people in the poorest countries? Does the global trading system give everyone a fair chance to compete? The answer is in the negative. In spite of all the nice attributes that are being propagated by the industrialised world, in structure and practice, the trade favours the metropolitan countries. It is trussed up in a web of practices which protect the earnings of some Northern producers and leave the poor Southerners fettered.

Regarding export of agricultural commodities for instance, these commodities enjoy so many subsidies in the North that the South can never compete with the industrialised countries that make up the region. EU/US for instance subsidize their farmer with over US$360 billion (US$1 exchanges for (N117) yearly, which amounts to about N117 billion (US$1 billion) per day! The EU underwrites its fishing industry by about 500 British pounds (one British pound exchanges for N234). You can see the deceit, the hypocrisy in trade liberalization. Yet about 70 per cent of Africans work in agriculture, a huge number when compared with a small number involved in agriculture in metropolitan countries. We have a natural advantage in producing agricultural commodities, but as discussed above, the trade system has been designed to undermine that advantage.

It may be argued that The EU has done some major reform of its subsidy mechanism - the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the fact remains that it still gives some help to its farmers which makes it hard for farmers in developing countries to compete. More still needs to be done. The kind of relief the South got on sugar is what is desired. It is such that will make the likes of Dangote Group succeed with Dangote Sugar Refinery PLC which entered the Nigerian Stock Exchange Market recently, with an Initial Public Offering of 3 billion shares that is expected to net in N54 billion.

So Zoellick is hitting the nail on the head. We only hope it is not all polemics, the kind of political rhetoric that we are fed with daily.

Sovereign Wealth Funds
Zoellick also outlined a plan to encourage emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil to invest about US$30 billion (N3.5 trillion) in African nations through government-sponsored wealth funds.

Such sovereign wealth funds currently hold about US$3 trillion (N409.5) in assets. They have come under scrutiny recently because of investments outside their own countries. Zoellick noted they need transparency and should be guided by best practices to avoid politicization, but "where some see sovereign funds as a source of concern, we see opportunity," said Zoellick.
The World Bank's "One Percent Solution" involves creating the equity investment platforms and benchmarks to attract these investors, and allocating 1 percent of the assets to African growth, development and opportunity.
"This one percent could be the start of something much bigger, across more types of funds and countries, because the investment of wealth into equity for development offers opportunity, not something to fear."

Extractive Industries Initiative
Zoellick announced a new approach to help ensure that high energy and commodity prices translate into improvements in the lives of the poor.

The EITI builds on the transparency and good governance concepts of the existing multi-stakeholder Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). EITI publicizes and verifies company payments and government revenues from oil, gas and mining. But many governments are emphasizing that transparent revenue reporting, while important, is not enough. The World Bank is therefore working with developing countries and other partners to frame a "comprehensive approach to supplement the original project."

EITI will include providing technical assistance to countries on the awarding of contracts, monitoring operations, collecting taxes, improving resource extraction and economic decisions, better managing price volatility, and investing revenues effectively in sustainable development.
An EITI approach will be launched in Guinea. "The successful development of Guinea's rich resources can strengthen sustainable development for the entire region," Zoellick said.

"The EITI can advance inclusive and sustainable globalization by broadening the beneficiaries of resource development."

http://www.businessdayonline.com