Developing world’s growing appetite to blame for rise in food prices: FAO

Food price volatility is expected to increase making poor farmers, consumers and countries more vulnerable to poverty and food insecurity, the United Nations warned on Monday.

Updated on: Oct 11, 2011, 24:05:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Food price volatility is expected to increase making poor farmers, consumers and countries more vulnerable to poverty and food insecurity, the United Nations warned on Monday.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in its Hunger Report 2011 said demand from consumers in rapidly growing economies such as India and China will increase and further growth in bio-fuels will place additional demands on the food system.

An alternate hunger report of civil society group Action Aid listed India ahead of Pakistan, Nigeria and 21 other countries for its vulnerability in being able to feed its people and grow enough food.

“The global scorecard places India at the seventh position on the climate and hunger vulnerability index, the report “On the brink: Who’s best prepared for a climate and hunger crisis?” said.

“With one-quarter of the world's people living in hunger, residing within its (India's) borders, any improvements to India's hunger levels could dramatically reduce global poverty and hunger. India is home to one-third of the world's undernourished children,” said Sandeep Chachra, Executive Director of ActionAid India.

Unlike the FAO report, which has not given a new figure on number of hungry people in the world, the Action Aid report says that 1.6 billion people — nearly a quarter of the world's population — live in countries that are highly vulnerable to climate-related food crises.

The scorecard showed that countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are recording higher food prices, incidences of land-grabbing for bio-fuels production or other purposes, and increased vulnerability to drought and floods.

The FAO didn’t differ much saying that small, import-dependent countries, particularly in Africa, are especially at risk.

The crises may challenge the efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the proportion of people who suffer from hunger in 2015, FAO economist Jacques Diouf warned in the report.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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