Food Price ”Catastrophe” Feared On Eve Of Summit

Soaring food prices could trigger a global catastrophe and the world’s poor need action, not words, from this week’s UN food security summit, human rights activists and the World Bank said on Monday.

The warning came as world leaders arrived in Rome for a global conference to tackle a food crisis that is pushing 100 million people into hunger, provoking food protests and could aggravate violence in war zones.
“The current food crisis amounts to a gross violation of human rights and could fuel a global catastrophe, as many of the world’s poorest countries, particularly those forced into import dependency, struggle to feed their people,” said Johannesburg-based poverty campaign group ActionAid.

“It is an outrage that poor people are paying for decades of policy mistakes such as the lack of investment in agriculture and the dismantling of support for smallholder farmers,” said ActionAid analyst Magdalena Kropiwnicka.

Poor harvests, low stocks and rising demand, especially from India and China, caused huge food price spikes over the last two years, stoking protests, strikes and violence in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned that increased hunger caused by the price spikes will exacerbate conflict in war zones and experts say food riots could worsen if nothing is done.

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Hunger campaigners have targeted the recent rise in bio-fuels — usually the conversion of food crops into energy — as one of the main culprits for the price rise and say the summit should declare a ban on arable land being switched to biofuel production.

“To continue the pursuit of biofuels in the face of the credible, impartial and growing opinion that this is exacerbating the food crisis is morally outrageous and utterly indefensible,” said Rob Bailey, of hunger campaigners Oxfam.

Planet Ark