Agribusiness readies technology to fight hunger
DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Agribusiness leaders are stepping up investment and technology to tackle world hunger and climate problems tied to agriculture, but they see no quick solution to hunger, which kills 25,000 people a day around the world.
"I'm not much of magic bullet guy and I really do believe in a multiplicity of approaches," Mark Cackler, who overseas rural poverty and agriculture programs for The World Bank, said in an interview at the World Food Prize forum on Friday.
"Each of us in our own way have the capacity, the potential and the duty to be leaders," he said.
Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, confronted Cackler and others at the annual gathering of world food industry leaders here with a challenge "in which the food sector of the world, which is the single largest sector of the world economy, is really at the heart of multiple intersecting crises."
"While there is discussion on each of these issues, I don't think we're on a trajectory of solution right now," Sachs said.
Sachs later told Reuters: "Pepsi or Monsanto or the big grain trading companies -- I want them to come to the forefront and to the lead of solving some of these problems."
"We cannot go on the way we're going and we need the food industry to say it first and foremost because we can't do this without the food industry's leadership to solve the problems."
Cackler said many participants at the forum had been discussing Sachs's critique and challenge.
"Jeff is absolutely right when he talks about the severity and the magnitude of the problem and how it's insufficiently recognized. God bless him for reminding us fervently about how serious these problems are," Cackler said.
"The fact that 25,000 people die every day of hunger and malnutrition, the fact over a billion go to bed hungry tonight is shameful," Cackler said.
But he added: "There are no magic bullets."
A FEW MORE GREEN SHOOTS?
Cackler and executives at the three-day conference pointed out areas of progress such as increases in public and private investment in areas of Africa, which along with South Asia dominates world hunger concerns.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced $120 million in grants to boost self-help efforts in agriculture in Africa and South Asia. Microsoft founder Gates told forum participants they must work together better.
"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates said, citing a fight over gene-altered crops. Continued...
