The UN’s top food expert Jacques Diouf has backed a plan to use surplus EU money to help those who face starvation. The European initiative would see about 1% of the Union’s budget used to help the poor in the developing world. Diouf said that an extra 75 million people had been pushed into poverty last year by rising food prices. The move was backed by development MEPs when they discussed it during African week.
Fertilizer and seeds are just two items that could be supplied to farmers under the plan. In a wide ranging interview when visiting the parliament to discuss food issues on 10 September, Mr Diouf, 70, called the aid an act of “basic human solidarity”.
Diouf attacks “lack of political will”
Seeking to allay concerns from European farmers about using such resources he told us that “the resources…are surplus and have become available because of rising prices on the international market”. Senegalese born Diouf also stressed the international reaction to such aid saying that such solidarity would “involve the populations of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific countries who are all linked to the EU”.
The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) went on to note that agriculture aid for the developing world had shrunk from 17% of all aid in 1980 to just 3% in 2006. He said that one effect of this was to make international targets on reducing hunger seem almost unachievable.
The original target had been to halve hunger by 2015 but as Diouf told a summit 6 years ago – “at this rate the objective will be achieved by 2150″. He told us that “a lack of political will and resources for agriculture” were identified as key problems.
World can feed 9 billion
By the middle of this century is it estimated that 9 billion people will occupy the planet, up one third from now. At such a rate we asked Mr Diouf if he thought the world could feed itself. He said it was a question “investment and technology” to produce more food.
Using examples to make his point Diouf told us that “two to four percent of the population in the developed world produce enough to feed its populations and export, whilst in developing countries 80% sometimes do not produce enough to feed the population”.
In Sub-Saharan Africa he identified the problem as one of harnessing rainfall and storing it so it could be used in agriculture.
A Senegalese former diplomat Jacques Diouf has headed the Rome based FAO since 1994. He shook off controversy in 2006 when a resignation letter from an Assistant Director General of the Organisation criticised his management style.
