UN plans to establish food crisis task force

from CTV
CTV.ca News Staff

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced Tuesday that he will lead a task force to deal with the global food crisis.

The first priority is finding US$755 million to meet the funding shortfall for the World Food Programme, he said Tuesday in Bern, Switzerland.

"We anticipate that additional funding will be required," he said.

However, the task force wants to look beyond just providing emergency aid for crises, he said. For example, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has established a US$1.7-billion plan to give seeds to farmers in the world's poorest countries.


The price of food staples has shot up around the world. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the development has left about 100 million more people in poverty in the past two years.

"This is not a natural disaster," he said.

So far, $475 million has been pledged in emergency relief, but Zoellick said that that more will be needed. "This crisis isn't over once the emergency needs are met," he said.

Jennifer Parmalee, a WPF official in Washington, told CTV Newsnet on Tuesday that her agency will be looking mainly to traditional donors, including Canada, "which was our third-largest donor last year."

The WPF's cost of obtaining food has gone up by 55 per cent just in the last nine months, she said, adding the world humanitarian community considers this the worst food crisis in 40 years.

Helping Afghanistan

World Food Programme officials inspected an emergency food distribution centre in Afghanistan and met with Afghan leaders on Tuesday. The WPF calls Afghanistan one of the countries in Asia most vulnerable to rising food prices.

In March, the WFP began a $77-million program to reduce suffering among members of high-risk groups:

* Households headed by women;
* Families with nine or more children;
* Disabled male heads of families; and
* Those internally displaced by the country's violence

The program helps 152,000 people in Kandahar province, where Canada's troops operate, and 317,000 across southern Afghanistan.

However, a total of 717,000 people receive some degree of food help in Kandahar, through initiatives such as food-at-school or food-at-work programs.

About one million Afghans live in Kandahar province.

Wheat is a staple in the area. In recent weeks, the price had doubled or even tripled, creating what the WFP calls "food insecurity," reported CTV's Paul Workman.

That essentially means children going hungry, he said.

"They've also noticed that prices have also started dropping -- by about 30 per cent -- since this program was initiated," Workman said by e-mail.

The WPF's Tony Bambury said Tuesday in Kandahar that Canada provided $25 million to his agency late last year and has donated $10 million to the emergency appeal, making it one of the larger donors.

Bambury worried what might happen when the program runs out in June.

Roots of the global crisis

On Sunday, the World Food Programme's John Powell told CTV's Question Period that skyrocketing food prices hurt poor nations the hardest.

"In Canada, Australia or here in Europe, typically, a family will spend 10 to 20 percent of their income on food," he said.

"If you're a poor person in a developing country, we're talking about 60 to 80 percent of your income being spent on food. That's a huge difference and a hugely difficult position that these people find themselves in."

To pay for food, people do the following, he said:

* Take their children out of school;
* Skip medical care;
* Cut back to two from three meals per day; and
* Shift to less nutritious food

These steps are particularly hard on the very youngest poor children in these developing nations, Powell said.

"It tips these people already on the razor's edge of survival right into the abyss," Parmalee said.

A variety of factors has been blamed for the crisis:

* Speculation by investors trading in food commodities;
* Unpredictable weather and climate change;
* Rising oil prices; and
* Growing demand from the increasingly affluent middle classes of China and India

The crisis has sparked violent protests in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.