U.N. leaders meet to chart solution to food crisis
GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations' top brass gathered in Switzerland on Monday to chart a solution to the dramatic food price increases that have caused hunger, riots and hoarding in poor countries around the world.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convened the heads of 27 international agencies including the World Bank, World Food Program (WFP), and World Trade Organization (WTO) to coordinate their action to dampen the global food crisis.
Officials familiar with the closed-door session said the main priority was to ensure that food aid reached those desperately affected by surging prices of wheat, rice, dairy products, and other dietary staples.
But the agency chiefs will also be looking to chart a way out of the current crisis, which experts have linked to factors including drought in Australia, higher fuel costs, the use of crops for biofuels and speculation on global commodity markets.
WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said medium- and long-term solutions were needed to lower food prices in a sustainable way.
"That means you are going to need more food production, and a system in which market signals are picked up early and quickly. And you need people who have stopped producing for various reasons to be producing again," Rockwell said.
Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has also called for efforts to encourage farmers to grow more crops.
"An old trading adage says 'the best cure for high prices is high prices,'" he wrote in an International Herald Tribune editorial on Friday. "Higher commodity prices can be expected to lead to higher supply, as long as governments allow price increases to be passed on to farmers."
'ABSOLUTE URGENCY'
The Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Food Price Index, which measures the market prices of cereals, dairy, meat, sugar and oils, was 57 percent higher in March 2008 than the same month last year.
Anger over those increases -- which have squeezed the world's poorest people hardest -- have sparked protests, strikes and riots in countries including Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, Haiti, Peru, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan.
Panic over limited rice supplies, which have come under pressure as a result of export restrictions in Thailand, Vietnam and India, has also spurred binge-buying in Asian countries.
And higher prices have also put extreme budgetary pressure on aid providers such as the World Food Program, the U.N. agency that aims to feed 73 million people this year.
"This will be the main point in Berne today. It is an absolute urgency," a U.N. human rights expert, Jean Ziegler, told journalists in Geneva on Monday.
"If humanitarian food aid is stopping, these people have absolutely no alternative," Ziegler said, referring to the poor. "The international community needs money really urgently."
Oxfam, a British-based aid and advocacy group, said it was essential that those meeting in Switzerland think beyond the immediate funding crunch when addressing the food crisis.
"World leaders must take this opportunity to address structural problems such as under-investment in agriculture and unfair trade rules, which are exacerbating the problem," said Oxfam International deputy advocacy director Celine Charveriat.
Ban, a South Korean national who took over the United Nations' helm from Ghana's Kofi Annan in January 2007, will address the press in the Swiss capital Berne on Tuesday morning.
(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Charles Dick)
