Food Fears: UN agriculture target "meaningless"

New UN calls to boost food production are meaningless if food cannot be transported and sold freely to the hungry, according to agriculture analysts Caroline Boin and Douglas Southgate.

“With tariffs and restrictions on trade, governments around the world have continually discouraged investment in agriculture and kept food prices artificially high. Poor countries would benefit greatly from freeing their own agricultural markets - the World Bank calculates that this could boost their annual income by around US$84 billion,” Boin said.

With news that hunger has been increasing for a decade, the Director-General of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, states that the “focus should be on increasing food production,” in a report issued prior to World Food Day (Friday 16 October 2009).

Professor Southgate, agricultural economist at Ohio State University, noted that both internal and external barriers must be lifted: “As hunger once again looms in East Africa, the region’s 2006 famine is a graphic reminder of why freeing up the trade in food is just as important as increasing crop yields. While crops were abundant in South-West Kenya in 2006, people in the North of the country were starving. Unless we remove these barriers, more famines are inevitable.”

UN: World hunger has been increasing for a decade , Associated Press,

UNFAO REPORT: The State of Food Insecurity report for 2009