Food crisis has changed game on beating poverty: U.N.

By Robin Pomeroy

ROME (Reuters) - World leaders must radically change their strategy toward beating poverty now that hunger can no longer be staunched by cheap food, the head of the United Nations farm aid agency said.

At a food summit in Rome next week, the international community must recognize that poverty challenges have changed and agree to reverse years of neglecting poor farmers, said the head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

"They (governments and donors) have taken cheap, affordable food on the international market for granted. We no longer can do that and we have to realize it's a profound structural problem," IFAD President Lennart Bage said in an interview late on Monday.

Initially called to address the effects of climate change on food security, vast food price hikes that continued well into this year have shifted the summit's focus to what U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a "global crisis".

Although not a donors' conference, world leaders are due to agree a statement on how to address food shortages and a task-force set up by Ban will issue an action plan.

Bage said a period of global abundance, which ran for 25 years from the early 1980s, had made some countries complacent.

"Many African leaders have said to me: 'Why should we use scarce resources for agriculture when there is abundant and cheap food available on the international market'.

"We were lulled into complacency that there's abundant and affordable food available -- that's not longer the case."