Long-term food shortages must be addressed: Experts

World leaders meeting tomorrow to discuss rocketing food prices need to concentrate on long-term shortages if they are to solve the problem, experts said today.

Although massive amounts of food aid have reached millions of homeless or hungry people after disasters in the last few years, hundreds of millions go hungry from the failure of agriculture in much of Africa and some parts of Asia and Latin America.

“What we’ve seen is we’re getting better at emergencies, but getting worse at tackling chronic hunger,” said Duncan Green, director of research at Oxfam.

“Even in 2006, which was a good food (harvest) year, 850 million people were hungry,” said Raj Patel, a political economist.

“It’s part of a chronic crisis which has recently become acute” because of soaring prices.

Agricultural development has been “horrendously neglected,” Mr Green said on the eve of the UN summit in Rome.

“I’d say it’s three decades of neglect,” said Jim Butler, deputy director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, which is hosting the summit. He said his agency will encourage aid to small farmers in the form of seed, feed, supplies, fertiliser and technology.

An internal report by the World Bank, which wealthy countries finance to help poor ones, concluded last year that the institution had long neglected farming in sub-Saharan Africa.

Agricultural development aid dropped by a half between 1980 and 2005.

In 2006, £2bn (€2.5bn) was spent on agricultural development, compared to the £12.5bn (€15.8bn) worldwide on subsidies to farmers by governments of developed countries eager to keep home products competitive.

Many argue that subsidiaries hurt small farmers abroad, since imported subsidised products compete for homegrown products in their countries, while proponents argue that subsidies will encourage more food for mouths worldwide.

Last week, the World Bank pledged to boost support for both agriculture and food aid. It calculates that food prices have increased by 83% over the last three years.

The dizzying escalation has been blamed on fuel rises, changing diets, urbanisation, expanding populations, climate change, bad weather, growth in biofuel production and speculation, as well as the legacy of flawed food policies.

The previous two decades saw pressures from international banks and governments in the developed world to get the state out of poor countries’ economies.

“The argument was that the state institutions were inefficient, and the private sector would do it better,” said Oxfam’s Mr Green. But “the private sector goes where it can make a decent profit” leaving out those “farmers in the middle of nowhere with no access to markets or roads.”