Food crisis requires new green revolution: Congress

By Missy Ryan and Christopher Doering

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress pushed the Bush administration on Wednesday to do more to boost global agriculture, faulting a long-term decline in foreign aid for the food crisis unfurling across the developing world.

"With proper planning, foresight and coordination, this crisis might have been managed ... What the world needs is a second green revolution," Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a hearing on the skyrocketing prices wreaking havoc on world food markets.

Lawmakers from both parties called for a reinvigorated U.S. response, akin to the push that raised crop yields and saved millions from starvation in Asia and beyond in the 1960s.

Food prices have risen over the past year in step with increased food demand in emerging economies, paltry harvests, record oil prices and growing biofuel production, a trend that is thrusting 100 million additional people into hunger.

At the same time, aid to fragile nations' farm sectors has dropped off in recent decades as donors like the World Bank and the U.S. government turned to other priorities like HIV/AIDS.

U.S. funding for agriculture development since 2000 has averaged just a third of what it was in the 1980s, bemoaned Sen. Dick Lugar, the committee's top Republican.

"Food shortages are likely to recur frequently, if the United States and the global community fail to ... invest in agricultural productivity in the developing world," he said.

For Lugar and other lawmakers, biotechnology and more open agricultural commerce are also promising avenues in the quest to help poor nations to feed themselves.