The United Nations General Assembly at its recent 63rd session called a one-day, informal forum on thematic dialogues on global food crisis and the right to food. The first-ever summit of agriculture ministers from the Group of Eight countries, due to be held shortly in the northern Italian province of Treviso, will possibly issue in their draft report a warning that the world faces the prospect of "a permanent food crisis," and this has once again diverted the attention of people worldwide to global food issue.
The food issue concerns not only the livelihood of people in all nations but also the world's development and stability. The U.N. has attached great importance to the situation with global food security over recent years. The global food crisis, compounded and reinforced as it is by the global financial crisis, the global energy crisis and the global climate crisis, was discussed at a Special Session of the 62nd General Assembly on food security held in Rome last year.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, told delegates at the food summit at the sponsorship of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on June 4, 2008 that dealing with the current world food crisis was a "fight that we cannot afford to lose." The crisis has not been apparently lessened nevertheless, in spite of some measures taken by the international community. The food security situation has remained grim to date because of floating cereals prices and unpredictable climate change.
At present, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry, every single night… for the first time ever, 1 billion people live on the verge of starvation, a U.N. official has been quoted as saying, and a child dies every six seconds of malnutrition or starvation. Since early last year, rising food prices have caused unrest and political protests around the world. If the international community fails to take prompt actions, more and more people would find themselves in abject poverty.
International community is currently stepping up efforts to explore ways out for coping with the growing food crisis. At the recent dialogue forum, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, President of the 63rd Session of the UN General Assembly, appealed for advancing toward a food policy based on right to food and setting up a new global structure for agriculture and food.
Intensified aid packages to developing nations represent a matter of urgency to ensure food security for all human beings. Many people of insight have proposed that the U.N. should urge developed countries to share with developing nations research findings from food grain production and processing, and to provide them with a fund support for the related research projects. Meanwhile, leaders of the least developed nations appealed to the UN secretary general to set up a global grain reserve stock to perform "the function of the global grain bank" by means of formulating uniform borrowing and repaying of loans for central grain reserve, in an endeavor to help the least developing nations to cope with food crisis.
Global food crisis has resulted from varied complicated causes and, to implement the above concrete tentative ideas, countries should first enhance their common understanding and insist on tackling global food issue under the framework of sustainable development. In order to create feasible and favorable conditions for maintaining the food security, a range of measures should be taken with regard to finance, trade, environment protection, aid provision, intellectual property rights (IT) and technology transfer.
Moreover, a global work scheme is required for the sake of ensuring global food security. With ample experience amassed in the course of responding to ongoing financial crisis, people have full reasons to believe that a more viable, effective way could be found to help overcome the global food crisis.
By People's Daily Online and contributed by Xi Laiwang, PD resident reporter at the U.N. Headquarters in N.Y.
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