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	Bono and Bob Geldof back African farmer subsidies by African Press Organization (APO) ONE International   Sept 2008   Bono and Bob Geldof have thrown their support behind a European Commission plan to give nearly 1.5 billion US dollars to African farmers.   The Irish rock stars-turned-activists sat by EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as he presented a new plan to utilise the nearly 1.5 billion dollars that Europe has set aside for its farmer subsidies and give it as aid to African farmers, helping buy fertiliser and seeds.   Bono said there are 935 million people around the world who are chronically malnourished, with 75 million of them just added this year.   September 22, 2008   Millennium Development Goals: ONE, Bono and Bob Geldof in New York. (APO)   ONE, Bono and Bob Geldof are in New York to pressure world leaders in the fight against disease, hunger and extreme poverty and with many other anti-poverty activists are calling for accelerated progress.   Eight years on from the 2000 UN Summit – the largest meeting of world leaders where eight goals were agreed to inject momentum into the fight against poverty, we stand at a crossroads: while there has been some good progress, the current global challenges don’t just threaten the ability to achieve these goals but also raise the potential spectre of a reversal of progress made to date.   A series of meetings in New York this week, culminating in an anti-poverty summit on September 25th attended by over 90 heads of state and representatives from the private sector and NGOs alike, will draw a clear line in the sand – does the world stand by these commitments at a time when they are even more necessary?   ONE is calling on world leaders to work together with diverse actors, in new ways, to build on successes and finish the job they have started, arguing that if development commitments are not addressed poverty, hunger and conflict will further exacerbate global financial and economic instability.   “Half way to 2015, it is time to celebrate the progress that has been made against poverty, and to develop innovative new partnerships to build on this success. We will be pushing world leaders to build on success despite tough economic times as well as innovate against extreme poverty.” said Jamie Drummond, Executive Director of ONE.   Malaria: There has been progress in pilot districts where the disease is endemic in Rwanda Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia, with demonstrable models to be scaled up to save the lives of the 2,400 who still die from malaria every day, mainly children in Africa. The Global Fund alone has distributed 59m insecticide treated malaria bed-nets worldwide. It is estimated 250m are needed to cover Africa effectively, as well as more widespread use of insecticides and therapies for treatment for malaria. An historic plan to aggressively innovate and accelerate this success against malaria, bringing in new donors and new partnerships and increased financing, will be presented.   Education: There has been progress since 1999 with 29m more children in school in Africa, 41m more globally. This progress must be built upon through a special side summit on education on Thursday September 25th. This meeting will call for immediate financing of all the “education for all” plans which are currently underfunded.   HIV/AIDS: In 2002 only 50,000 African people living with HIV/AIDS were on lifesaving medications; today 2.1m Africans are on treatment and nearly 3m globally. However, 4.9m more African people and 1.8m more globally still need these medicines – and every day 6,800 people are infected with HIV/AIDS around the world.   Child mortality: The number of children dying from preventable, treatable illnesses has reduced from 12.7m to 9.2m per year since 1990 – nearly 10,000 fewer children dying every day – but still 25,000 are dying daily.   Maternal mortality: Over half a million women still die each year from treatable and preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth. The maternal mortality rate is not declining and will be the subject of much attention, led by the White Ribbon Alliance. We sincerely hope there will be a series of new announcements on investing in healthcare workers and health systems to help fight maternal mortality.   Hunger: In the last year the number of people going hungry increased from 848m to 923m globally, brought on by a 50% increase in food prices in many of the poorest countries. Meanwhile at least 30 countries have emergency needs for an immediate investment in seeds, fertilizers and food to fight hunger and kick-start agricultural development. This immediate gap could be filled by the reallocation of some unspent European agricultural subsidy funds - a proposal which must be fully adopted in Brussels by European leaders. Visit the related web page
	Delivering on the commitment to address hunger by UN News & agencies Ireland   Sept 2008   Ireland''s Hunger Taskforce releases hunger report. (UN News)   Soaring food prices, climate change and population growth had caused a worsening world food crisis, according to the findings of a report outlined at a UN press conference by members of Ireland’s Hunger Task Force.   Ireland had called for the establishment of the Hunger Task Force in 2006 to identify the contributions it could make to international efforts to reduce hunger. The 15-member Task Force, which includes a mixture of national and international experts, is part of the Government’s effort to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015.   Calling on the international community to increase aid to poorer nations, as they briefed correspondents, were Ireland’s Minister of State for Overseas Development, Peter Power, along with representatives of the Task Force: Joe Walsh, Chairman of the Irish Hunger Task Force; Pamela Anderson, Director-General of the International Potato Center; Nancy Aburi, Nigeria-based Strategic Resources (K) Limited; Justin Kilcullen of the Irish Catholic Agency for World Development; and Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.   Mr. Walsh, underlining that there were over 960 million hungry people in the world and 10 million children dying of starvation each year, said those statistics were worsening, owing to increasing food prices, climate change and a rising population. “Rather than the situation getting better - the increase in the price of food and cereals in particular, climate changes and the increase in population, the situation is getting worse rather than better in many respects,” he said.   The Task Force report makes recommendations in three key areas: improving smallholder productivity in Africa; enhancing efforts to tackle maternal and infant undernutrition; and delivering on existing commitments and ensuring coherence in the international architecture to address hunger.   On the need to increase agricultural productivity, he said that, over the past two decades, expenditure on agricultural activity had declined from 5.3 per cent to 3 per cent, and with that the ability to improve the lot of the smaller farmer. Particularly at risk was the 70 per cent of farmers in the poorest countries who lived in rural areas, 80 per cent of which was women.   Concerning the second area, nutrition, Mr. Walsh said that that was a forgotten aspect in the fight against hunger. “People have confused quantity with quality,” he said, stressing the need to ensure that the situations that led individual growth to be stunted because of a lack of key nutrients - in some cases, only micro-nutrients - were addressed.   Turning to the third area of concern, governance, he called on Governments involved in the fight against hunger to follow through on their aid pledges. Measures must be put in place to ensure adherence to commitments. Ireland, for its part, had recommended the appointment of a special envoy to ensure that its commitments were implemented.   Responding to a question about whether the developed world could afford to focus on the issue of hunger in light of the current global financial crisis, Mr. Sachs pointed out that Governments were only asked to contribute 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to the cause.   “The idea that you can’t afford this is shocking,” Mr. Sachs said. Wall Street paid itself more in bonuses each year than the whole world gave to Africa. “There is a misunderstanding on foreign assistance. People overstate foreign assistance by 50 times. The US is addicted to shipping food to Africa. It is 10 times more expensive than helping Africa to grow its own food,” he said. Ms. Anderson said: “It’s not - can we afford to do this? It’s - can we afford not to?”   Sept 2008   Starving the world for profit, Tim Colebatch. (The Age )   Food, the ultimate necessity of life, has become far more expensive for a billion of the world"s most vulnerable people. And the crisis is not over.   The consequences are serious. The World Bank and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have warned that the world risks losing seven years of progress in the fight against global poverty. The World Bank warned that over 100 million people are at risk of being forced back into extreme poverty, and more than 1 billion poor people have seen food become significantly more expensive and harder to get.   UN rapporteur on food supplies Jean Ziegler has accused commodity speculators of "murder" for driving prices so high that people can no longer afford to eat. In most developing countries, governments are protecting the poor by subsidising food prices, but at high cost. And people"s faith in markets has been eroded. This is not how markets should work.   Sharp price rises in the key grains — corn, wheat and rice — and oilseeds such as soybeans are the food that the world"s poor live on.   Take corn, or in Latin America, maize. Between the end of 2005 and mid-2008, the price of maize almost trebled. Even now, a cob of corn costs 55% more than it did a year ago. Wheat prices rose 167% between the start of 2006 and March 2008. Soybean prices doubled in 18 months.   But the most devastating price rises have been for rice, the staple that feeds half the world. Five years ago, a tonne of benchmark Thai rice cost $US197 on global markets. As consumption outpaced production, the price took off. By this time last year, it was $US330 a tonne. Then hyperinflation took over: from $US393 a tonne in January to $US481 in February, $US673 in March and $US1015 in April: trebling in seven months. Since then it has slowly subsided to $US737 in August — still nearly four times its cost in 2003.   Raghbendra Jha, director of the South Asian Studies Centre at the Australian National University, argues that global investors triggered the price rises. With stock prices globally sliding, and house prices doing the same, investors turned their minds to commodity markets, for both fuel and food. There were no changes to supply and demand that could explain such a huge price rise in 2008, he says. "No model forecast this." The speculators were the driving force.   It was another story with maize, the staple food of much of the Americas. In a recent working paper, A Note on Rising Food Prices, senior World Bank economist Donald Mitchell took the evidence apart forensically, and concluded that the steep price rises were driven by US and European policies to promote biofuels — which made corn more valuable as a fuel than as a food. In the US, 25% of corn production last year went to create ethanol, at such low efficiency that to fill the tank of a large SUV requires enough corn to feed a man for a year.
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