World Food security at risk

A top U.S. official said on Thursday global food prices could soar again if countries don’t cooperate to increase food production especially in developing countries.

Ertharin Cousin, U.S. ambassador to U.N. food agencies in Rome, said factors such as continued use of land for biofuels, and food scarcity, which led to a spike in global food prices and sparked riots in several countries in 2008, are still present.

“I think what has changed is the that we don’t have the price spikes that resulted in the challenges, but the factors that created the price spikes are still there … we are in jeopardy of another crisis,” Cousin said in an interview in Brussels.

Cousin, who was in Brussels to speak about transatlantic cooperation on food security, said it was necessary for the United States, the European Union and other donors to work together on how to coordinate plans to increase food productivity in poor regions.

The United States last week launched a $3.5 billion global anti-hunger plan in 20 countries in which targeted projects would expand local production.

The new strategy, dubbed “feed the future”, will initially focus on 12 African states and 4 each from Asia and Latin America; including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti and Honduras.

Cousin said the plan was not so much a policy shift by the U.S. — which has until now tackled the food crisis by shipping surplus U.S. grains to needy areas — but the implementation of an agreement reached by G8 world leaders at the L’Aquila summit in Italy in July 2009.

At that summit, nations pledged $22 billion over three years to combat chronic hunger around the world with nearly one billion people suffering from food shortages. The figure has climbed when food prices soared in 2008.

Reuters