UN food agency urges G20 to act on rising prices and huge waste

The world’s top farm producers in the G20 countries must agree coordinated action to ease worries about food prices, the head of the UN’s food agency said yesterday, as he and other experts bemoaned a huge global waste of food and water.

The third price surge in four years has come after droughts in the US and poor crops from Russia and the Black Sea bread basket region.

Senior figures from the G20 will discuss the food price rises this week, but any decisions on action are unlikely before a mid- September report on grain supply, officials have said.

Jose Graziano da Silva, director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said he would not characterise the current food price rise as a crisis, but it could reach that level next year if harvests in the southern hemisphere were disappointing.

“We need coordinated action and I believe that the G20 is responsible enough for this action,” he told a news conference during a conference on water in Stockholm.

The annual World Water Week conference looks at how resources are used and the link between water and food security.

Mr da Silva said any coordination should involve avoiding unilateral export bans and encouraging the substitution of foods.

He noted that between 85% and 95% of the crops most affected by the price rises, wheat and corn, came from the G20. He said even if wheat prices rose 10% to 20% that did not mean bread prices would rise by the same amount.

Mr da Silva noted the food price rally was not as serious as in 2007 and 2008, when there were violent protests in countries including Egypt, Cameroon and Haiti.

“There is no crisis,” he told Reuters. “This kind of panic buying is what we need to avoid at the moment.”

Mr da Silva and other experts at the conference said there was also a massive waste of food in the world, an issue that needed to be resolved in order better to harness resources.

“Up to half of the food we produce never gets eaten,” Torgny Holmgren, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute said. A quarter of the water used worldwide was used to produce over 1bn tonnes of food that nobody eats, he said.

Mr da Silva told the conference that one third of all food production was lost due to poor storage in developing countries, or food being thrown away in rich countries. He said water security was vital for food security and that food needed to be produced in a way that conserved water.