Saturday, April 19, 2008

"Business as usual is no longer a viable option,"

Yet another report concerning the growing world-wide food crisis.

A UN World Food Program report says the world produces enough food for every one, yet over 800 million people go hungry. Its authors say food is cheaper and diets are better than 40 years ago, but malnutrition and food insecurity threatens millions nonetheless.
"The unequal distribution of food and conflict over control of the world's dwindling natural resources presents a major political and social challenge to governments," said the report's authors.

Robert Watson, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and chief economist at Britain's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, said the global production of food has increased, "but not every one has benefited." Watson blamed governments and private businesses for paying more attention to growth in production than natural resources or food security.
"Continuing with current trends means the Earth's haves and have-nots splitting further apart," he said. "It would leave us facing a world nobody wants to inhabit. We have to make food more available and nutritious without degrading the land."

I think Watson really means growth of profit margins and growth of investment returns more than peoples needs concern governments and businesses .

Supachai Panitchpakdi , the head of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development said speculators on commodities futures markets were worsening the problem of high food prices, and he hoped the April 20-25 UNCTAD meeting in Ghana would address this.
"I hope that one of our sessions ... would handle this issue, how to look into the activities of commodities futures in a way that the futures market would help solve the food issue, not aggravate it," he said.

How sad it remains that the so - called experts are still totally naive about the motivation of the capitalist class that they see them as a solution and not the real problem

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