The Failure of the U.N. Food Crisis Summit

The Failure of the U.N. Food Crisis Summit

thenazareneway to Communions


The global food crisis summit hosted by the United Nations has failed to reach any formal agreement on combating hunger threatening over a billion people.

Delegates from 183 countries at the three-day talks in Rome were supposed to issue a declaration Thursday on "eliminating hunger and securing food for all."

But bickering over trade barriers, the use of genetically modified crops and geopolitics has raised the prospect of the summit being a complete failure.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization called the meeting to seek ways to secure food supplies in the face of poor harvests, rising fuel costs and rising demand, especially from rapidly developing Asian countries.

Commodity prices have doubled over past few years and put 100 million people at risk of joining the 850 million already going hungry, according to the World Bank.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said Wednesday he doubted the U.N. food crisis summit in Rome would yield a "positive agreement" as countries squabbled over wording of a joint declaration.

What was supposed to be an emergency conference on food shortages, climate change and energy turned into a global podium for powerful politicians to grandstand mostly about economic issues in their own countries and political priorities, the New York Times reported.

"Everyone complained about other people's protectionism - and defended their own," Andrew Martin and Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote.

Many representatives of poorer countries expressed frustration at the tenor of the meeting.

"We believe the problem is much more political than everything else," Walter Poveda Ricaurte, agriculture minister of Ecuador, told the Times. "We have to differentiate between the countries who are really affected by the food crisis and those who are seeing it as an economic opportunity."

Despite repeated urgings at the summit to stop talking about hunger and take action, it was the wording of the final document that threatened to undermine the talks' success.

"We mustn't give in to panic ... to surrender to the temptation for short-term solutions, even if we have to respond to a situation of distress," European Union aid commissioner Louis Michel told the summit, according to Agence France-Presse.

Biofuels were the most contentious issue at the summit, with the United States and Brazil defending their use of maize and sugarcane, respectively, to produce fuel. Washington acknowledges this contributes to food inflation, but says the impact is marginal.

The final declaration was likely to appease both sides with talk of the "challenges and opportunities" of biofuels, which U.S. agriculture official Schafer called "acceptable".

The wrangling over diplomatic language came after U.N. officials announced almost $3 billion of new aid to help ease the food crisis.

Those new pledges were welcomed, but U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned that up to $20 billion a year would be needed. "We simply cannot afford to fail," he told the summit.

Differences over GM

The unacknowledged new world empire - that of the USA - is flexing its muscles on the GM food issue.

The biggest divisions at the Rome conference are over two issues - genetically modified crops and biofuels - and, on both, the US stands on the side of the new technologies. It believes GM food to be safe and is subsidising the planting of biofuel crops. Within 10 years, 40% of US maize production will go on biofuels

Africa's resistance to growing GM food is in large part led by resistance in Europe. If African countries cannot export food to Europe, then they want no part of the new technology.

But that is not the whole story.

One of the most hi-tech GM laboratories in the world is in Uganda.

When I visited it, the technicians were looking for a cure for a blight called "banana wilt", which devastates growth of the large green bananas that are a big source of protein in East Africa.

In a laboratory, under bright artificial sunlight, thousands of tiny banana trees were being injected and dissected by white-coated lab assistants, who were all Ugandan, as was the management.

But the funding was all from the USA, rolling out its technology where it legally can.

'Strings attached'

Here in Rome, Kenya's agriculture minister said that this was the kind of technology that Africa needs.

Finding a solution to the problem of feeding nine billion people... will take more than the dynamism of empires to achieve. But it comes with strings attached. GM crops require fertilisers and other specialised products to keep them going and they all come from the USA.

And crops that need planting every year, like wheat and rice, need to have all of their seed replaced annually by new seed and that too comes from the USA.

That would be a major change in practice for small farmers, who up to now have always retained part of their harvest to replant during the following season.

A UN scientific examination of the way forward in agriculture earlier this year concluded that, where new technology is tried, it needs to be both sustainable and appropriate, building on what is known in Africa, rather than imposing solutions that may depend on US technology.

Biofuels versus Food

With land scarce, food is increasingly competing against biofuels, once thought to be a magic solution to reducing the world's dependence on oil and coal, but now causing more questions to be asked, because of the amount of energy needed to convert the plants to fuel.

Three-quarters of the increase in US maize production last year went on biofuels.

And the growth in planting crops for biofuels worldwide last year has been identified by the report on the table at this conference as one of the main causes of the runaway rise in food prices during the first 3 months of this year.

African countries are asking why their hungry people are having to pay more for food when the USA is subsidising growth of crops for biofuels.

The talks this week have been taking place amid the ruins of another empire, that of ancient Rome, which began its decline and fall when the demand for grain to feed a city of more than a million people became impossible to sustain.

---- Compiled from wire reports and other media sources