14 DAY TRIAL // The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced on Monday that the world should not get the impression that the global food security crisis had passed simply because the price of grain had slightly dropped over the last period. The organization said that the actual number of those below the limit of poverty continued to rise even at that moment in under-developed countries, where the economic crisis struck hardest. In addition, despite the fact that stock prices dropped, the retail ones did not.
“The level of prices is still 19 percent above the average of 2006 (...) so we're still in a period of high prices. Not only is the crisis here, but it's been worsened by the financial and economic crisis,” the Director-General of the UNFAO, Jacques Diouf, told at a news conference after a meeting in Bangkok. He argued that retail prices were still high in the developing world, even though there was no reason why they should remain so, seeing how international market prices dropped.
He said that merchants kept the prices high artificially, because people who bought food from them had no access to regular sources of information so as to know when they were cheated. “We're afraid that if there are any serious climate factors affecting production, we will be back to where we were in 2007. We've seen serious floods in north America and southern Africa,” Diouf also added, describing the current international situation as “very fragile.”
Over the last two years alone, more than 115 million people passed the undernourishment limit, and so the total number of those now living on less food than they would need to survive has reached the unimaginable figure of 963 million, according to UN reports. This means that roughly one in six individuals on Earth is extremely poor. Most of them live in the Asia-Pacific region.
“The first and foremost important element is the need to invest in agricultural production, and this would require $30 billion a year,” Diouf pinpointed. The sum is necessary to aid some 500 million small farmers, who will then have the material resources necessary to support the rest of the population, by making very cheap grain and other products available to others.