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Economic crisis requires swift action on hunger: FAO chief
2009-10-16
ROME (AFP) - The international community must do more to feed the world's hungry in a "historically unprecedented" global economic crisis, the head of the UN's food agency Jacques Diouf said on Friday. In an address to mark the UN's World Food Day, Diouf called on world leaders to urgently find "a broad consensus on the total and rapid elimination of hunger". "The current (economic) crisis is historically unprecedented in several ways," Diouf said in the speech at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome. "As developing countries are more financially and commercially integrated in the world economy, a drop in the global demand or supply and in credit availability had immediate repercussions on them," he said. Diouf said an additional 105 million people had been pushed into hunger as the crisis had "reduced the incomes and employment opportunities of the poor and significantly lowered their access to food". The FAO chief said there are now some 1.02 billion undernourished people worldwide -- one-sixth of the global population. He suggested governments should increase agriculture's share in official development assistance to its 1980 level of 17 percent, up from five percent today. Pope Benedict XVI echoed Diouf's comments in a statement published on the FAO website. The 82-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church urged "the international community and its institutions to intervene in a more suitable and decisive manner", adding that access to food was a fundamental human right. Heads of state and government are set to meet in Rome on November 16-18 at a UN FAO World Summit on Food Security. The summit's aim is to find ways for poor countries to boost their agricultural productivity and improve the management of their food resources.
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