6-05-08, 9:19 am
Original source: Xinhuanet
ROME, June 4 (Xinhua) -- As much as 15 billion to 20 billion U.S. dollars would be needed yearly to help fight the food crisis amid soaring prices, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said here on Wednesday.
'Substantial new resources will be needed, perhaps as much as 15 billion to 20 billion U.S. dollars a year as our efforts build up,' Ban told a press conference on the sidelines of a world summit on the food crisis hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Ban said most of the money would come from concerned countries themselves, but bilateral donors, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and development banks also need to contribute.
In a twin-track strategy outlined Tuesday to tackle soaring food prices, the UN chief urged the international community to take immediate steps to increase food availability to vulnerable people in the short term, and called for more investment in agriculture, especially in developing countries, as a long-term solution.
'We must not address only the immediate symptoms of the problem-- that of soaring food prices. We must focus on the underlying causes of the problem: years of neglect of the agricultural sector around the world, and the lack of investment in increasing productivity,' Ban said at the press conference.
He warned that to ensure world food security is a fight that must be won.
'This is a fight we can not afford to lose. The enemy is hunger. Hunger degrades everything we have been fighting for in recent years and decades,' he said.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) announced Wednesday it is rolling out an additional 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in food assistance to help tens of millions of people in more than 60 nations hardest hit by the urgent food crisis.
'With soaring food and fuel prices, hunger is on the march and we must act now,' WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said in a statement. 'If we do not act quickly, the bottom billion will become the bottom two billion virtually overnight as their purchasing power is cut in half due to a doubling in food and fuel prices.'
The Rome-based organization planned to provide roughly 5 billion U.S. dollars to help nearly 90 million people in 78 countries this year.
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf told the press conference that the Islamic Development Bank would spend 1.5 billion U.S. dollars on agriculture in the poorest countries.
The bank's President Ahmad Mohamed Ali said the money was not intended as emergency aid to deal with shortages of food or rising prices, but would be used to buy seeds and fertilizer for farmers as well as to fund research into improving yields.
The three-day summit, which kicked off Tuesday, was the first global response to the recent cycle of food prices hike, aimed at winning donor pledges for urgent aid as short-term solutions and also to generate longer term strategies to safeguard food production.
From Xinhuanet
