Thread: France doubles aid as world grapples with food insecurity

France doubles aid as world grapples with food insecurity

Agence France-Presse

PARIS - France pledged Friday to double its emergency food aid in 2008, as the United Nations agency charged with relieving world hunger made a second urgent appeal for funds inside a month.

President Nicolas Sarkozy told an international climate change gathering in Paris that he would release 60 million euros (100 million dollars) this year -- with a warning that the world's food crisis was breeding violence.

"We must act urgently to strengthen food security at a time when 37 countries are going through a very serious food crisis," Sarkozy said.

"We cannot remain indifferent to the unrest among those people who, in the developing countries, can no longer satisfy their hunger."

The World Food Programme (WFP) request for 256 million dollars came on top of another "extraordinary emergency appeal" for 500 million dollars launched in March.

The agency has estimated that food prices have risen some 55 percent since June 2007 -- and warned that, without top-up funds, it would have to cut rations distributed to 73 million people in 78 countries.

Food prices have spiraled globally due to rising populations, strong demand from developing countries, the use of certain foods in biofuels, and the increasing frequency of floods and droughts amid concern over climate change.

The surging cost of staples such as rice, wheat, soybean and corn has provoked protests and rioting in at least half a dozen developing countries, even toppling Haiti's prime minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis last weekend.

Protests have also erupted in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and Mauritania -- with 10,000 garment workers rioting in Bangladesh.

Sarkozy was speaking to ministerial-level representatives from the world's major carbon emitters, including China and India.

However, International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told French radio Friday that a developed-world accent on developing biofuels to reduce its carbon footprint poses "a real moral problem".

He said hydrogen engines "will be much more efficient in the years to come," and said the emissions problem "must be balanced with the fact that people are going to die of hunger".

The United States and Brazil have massive programs for converting grains, sugar and soy beans into ethanol and biodiesel that are then used as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Record oil prices of nearly 115 dollars a barrel have exacerbated the crisis.

Asian Development Bank president Haruhiko Kuroda said Friday that food price inflation was impacting heavily on more than 600 million Asians still living on a dollar a day or less.

He said the ADB was ready to help low-income countries like Bangladesh. Others such as Vietnam, Cambodia and former Soviet republics in central Asia all now have double-digit inflation.

"The best way is to provide targeted income support for the needy poor, particularly in South Asia and in some parts of Southeast Asia," Kuroda added.

Some countries, such as China, were in a strong position to allow their currencies to rise and should do so to help ease the pain from higher-priced food imports, he said.

Longer term, Kuroda said the solution to high food prices was raising productivity through increased government investments in the farm sector.

To that end, the Philippines agriculture department said Friday that its farmers will be encouraged to shift to hybrid varieties of rice in a bid to copy China's model for rice self-sufficiency.

Manila has been scrambling to boost stocks and raise yields, with its most recent tender for 500,000 tons of imported rice falling short by 174,250 tons.

Its government earlier this week announced a billion-dollar investment in the farm sector over three years to boost yields.

Europe has not escaped a ripple-effect, although the European Union's Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel thought that rising food prices would benefit the continent's agricultural sector.

"Those countries that have exports, they now earn more money," she said.