22 April 2008
Today the Prime Minister will host a meeting with leading experts, including the head of the World Food Programme, to discuss the need for urgent co-ordinated action to tackle the threat the world faces from rising food prices.
In an article for the Downing Street website, Mr Brown says that consumer groups, food producers, manufacturers and retailers all have a role to play in dealing with the issue.
Read the full article
At the moment we’re hearing a lot about the world financial crisis, and rightly so. But there’s another world crisis underway, a world food crisis that threatens to roll back progress made in recent years to lift millions of people out of poverty and, through increased inflation, affect us all.
Every day 25,000 people die — including one child every five seconds — from hunger-related causes. Food prices today are the highest they’ve been since 1945, with the prices of rice and wheat now double what they were only a year ago. When the cost of food now accounts for more than half a poor family’s spending, it can be truly devastating for millions living on the edge.
That is why after years of progress, in which the proportion of people going hungry across the world halved, those numbers are growing for the first time in 40 years.
The situation is so bad that countries across the world are already experiencing food riots.
Hunger is a moral challenge to each one of us as global citizens, but it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of poor nations around the world. Riots now threaten democratically elected governments. Going hungry means that poor people are less able to work and make a living, but hunger also stands in the way of our efforts to improve standards in education and to cut child deaths.
The scale of the problem we face is vast. The World Health Organisation now views hunger as the number one threat to public health across the world, responsible for a third of child deaths and ten per cent of all disease.
So, as we push forward in our bid to meet our Millennium Development Goals to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, it is vital that we address this new challenge.
Today the UK is pledging £30m to support the World Food Programme’s work in some of the countries most affected by food price inflation - including Zimbabwe, Somalia and Kenya. And we will also provide an additional £25m for social protection in Ethiopia once the future structure of the programme is agreed.
As well as the terrible human impact overseas, the resulting increased inflation brought about by rising food costs affects us all. The problems abroad impact on our situation domestically. Although prices here in the UK still remain historically low, it is not surprising that we see our shopping bills go up in the context of soaring international food prices.
That is why I want consumer groups, food producers, manufacturers and retailers to consider how we can collectively meet the challenges posed by the global food crisis.
And I believe we need to see a fully coordinated response by the international community. That is why I have written to the Chair of the G8, PM Fukuda, asking him to call on the World Bank, the IMF and the UN to work together to produce a plan to tackle this emerging crisis.
We will need short-term measures to deal with immediate hardship as well as a plan to address the more structural causes.
A deal on trade that opens up rich country markets and cuts subsidies could be a huge incentive for increased food production in poor countries, and we are now inches from such a deal. But it will take real leadership in the coming weeks to secure the deal we need and want.
As millions around the world have grown richer, they are demanding more and higher quality food, with supply today now lagging behind demand.
I want to see an agricultural revolution that helps poor farmers in developing countries to grow more and ensure more of the food produced actually gets to market rather than being left to rot, as more than half of it is at present. A large ‘aid for trade’ package will be crucial to help poor farmers build storage facilities, better roads and develop the capacity to sell their products in our markets. And we need to undertake research to explore technological solutions to improve the security and consistency of supply. We must take the initiative to further develop higher-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of crop.
And we now know that biofuels, intended to promote energy independence and combat climate change, are frequently energy inefficient. We need to look closely at the impact on food prices and the environment of different production methods and to ensure we are more selective in our support. If our UK review shows that we need to change our approach, we will also push for change in EU biofuels targets.
There is also clearly a need for greater World Bank and International Monetary Fund support to countries affected by the current crisis. In the short term, net food importing countries suffering from balance of payments difficulties as a result of higher global food prices should be given rapid access to IMF support under established mechanisms, and we should also consider the role of market-based risk management instruments in combating food price volatility.
For the very poor, social safety nets focused on early child nutrition have been successful in countries like Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Bangladesh but, as food becomes more expensive, we may need to increase the scale of our support for these kinds of humanitarian programmes, at least in the short term. As part of our efforts on education I will be proposing more school-based nutrition programmes to ensure children are not too hungry to study.
We must also do more to explore the links between climate change and food, and particularly their impact on the livelihoods and vulnerability of the very poorest, who are likely to be most affected by climate change.
All of these issues will be vital to steering a course through the current crisis. At our Food Summit in Downing St today, Douglas Alexander and I will be working with scientists and experts from the UN, Africa and EU to chart a course forward on each of these issues, in the run up to the G8 in July and the special UN Summit in September.
With one child dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes, the time to act is now.
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