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	Greater investment needed to feed the world by Thin Lei Win Reuters Alertnet Thailand   June -Bangkok (AlertNet)   Agriculture in developing nations needs massive investment of over $200 billion each year to provide enough food for the world"s growing population by 2050, the United Nations said this week.   Launching a global online campaign against hunger, Hiroyuki Konuma, Asia-Pacific representative for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), warned that failure to deliver could lead to violence.   "We will have real problems with the public if there"s a shortage of food," he told reporters in Bangkok. "People will start to attack the shops to steal food, and this happened in Somalia during the shortage of rice two years ago. It will really create real social unrest."   Already the tally of chronically hungry people has surpassed the eye-popping one billion mark, with two thirds of them based in Asia Pacific, the planet"s most populous region.   The "1billionhungry" project calls for a joint effort by national governments, the private sector and donor agencies to tackle food insecurity, which is on the rise despite promises from world leaders at summits like the G8 meeting in L"Aquila last July.   The web-based campaign aims to collect at least a million names on a petition pressuring politicians to make the elimination of hunger their top priority, and has gathered more than 101,000 signatures in just three weeks.   If the world continues at its current pace of hunger reduction, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the percentage of hungry people by 2015 will not be met, FAO says.   And longer-term, it estimates that global agricultural production must grow by 70 percent to feed the estimated 9 billion people that will inhabit the planet in 2050.   Sumiter Singh Broca, policy officer in Bangkok, told AlertNet an annual investment of $209 billion needs to be made in 93 developing countries for the next four decades to boost production dramatically in a way that reflects the trend towards higher consumption of meat, oils, fats and sugar.   "Remember, it is not enough to double food production, you must also make sure that the right kinds of food commodities are being produced (the ones people want)," he said. So far that investment has not happened. Agriculture made up around 17 percent of development assistance in the 1980s, but by 2005, that proportion had dropped to 3.5 percent, Konuma said.   Last year, it bounced back to around 5 percent - a number Konuma described as "still very small". In addition, many developing countries themselves invest less than 10 percent of their budgets in agriculture, he noted.   FAO says most of the food production boost required in the next 40 years will come not from an expansion in farmland - as it is becoming scarce and being sold off in growing quantities to foreign investors. Instead productivity will have to increase through improvements in agricultural technology, new crop varieties and more irrigation.   Poorer countries are still producing lower rice yields than wealthier agricultural societies, for example, a gap that can be closed. While many countries in Asia Pacific produce 2.5 to 3 tonnes of rice per hectare of land, the average yield in Japan, Korea and China is around 5 to 6 tonnes per hectare, according to Konuma.   "There"s still room, through technological improvements, to increase productivity. This way, we may able to cope with the existing constraints," he said. "That"s why investment in agricultural research, infrastructure and various support services is important."   Of the around one billion hungry people in the world, 642 million live in Asia Pacific, 265 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 million in the Near East and North Africa, and 15 million in developed countries.   From 2008 to 2009, both Asia Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa (where almost one in three people is undernourished) saw a 10 percent increase in the number of hungry people, according to FAO.   The organisation says the global economic slowdown - which came on the heels of the 2006-2008 food price spike - has left an additional 100 million people without access to adequate food.   Those two problems have exacerbated an already hostile climate for tackling global hunger - steadily declining investment in agriculture, changing dietary habits, extreme weather events, a widening gap between rich and poor, shrinking resources for food production and a growing global population.   As a result, the declining trend of undernourished people in developing countries reversed in 2008 and is expected to have increased again in 2009.   "Every six seconds you count, one child dies from hunger. Every day, 14,000 children die as a result of hunger. Every year 5 million children die from going hungry. It is very serious," Konuma said. Visit the related web page
	Steps Out of the Global Development Crisis by Jens Martens Friedrich- Ebert-Stiftung Germany   Throughout the developed world, the global economic and financial crisis appears to come to an end. The G20 ministers of finance already discuss exit strategies. Major international banks such as Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank once again enjoy quarterly profits totalling billions. As if there had never been a crisis, hedge funds are more active than ever before on the international finance markets.   However, the tsunami waves sent out by the global crisis are just reaching the developing countries, hitting them with full power despite the time lag. The crisis is having a dramatic social and economic impact on the South.   The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that the number of registered unemployed had grown by 34 million between 2007 and 2009. In addition, millions of people have been pushed into informal employment owing to a lack of social security systems. The number of people living in extreme poverty is on the increase again, too. According to estimates by the World Bank, up to 263 million more people can expect to live in poverty by 2015 than would have been the case without the crisis. The number of people living in hunger exceeded a billion in 2009 – the highest number in human history. The number is expected to decline this year, but remains higher than before the crisis.   Given this grim scenario, the prospects of achieving the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, by 2015 recede ever more into the distance. Combined with the climate crisis and the unresolved food crisis, the financial crisis has turned into a global development crisis.   So far, governments have not delivered an appropriate response to dramatic consequences of the crisis. In particular, G20 crisis management has given too little consideration to the needs of people in poorer countries.   Without doubt, the crisis has brought about changes in economic policy discourse. The blind faith of neoliberal economists in the self-regulatory forces of the market has been shaken. So far, however, these changes have not been reflected in any corresponding substantial shifts in policies. Instead, a trend towards business as usual is again becoming apparent. One example is an observation by Holger Schmieding, Bank of America’s chief economist for Europe. Given the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he noted:   “Lehman was an accident. Now the accident site has been cleared, and traffic can roll again.”   This is precisely the wrong approach. Instead, a comprehensive program is needed to tackle the global development crisis at its roots, mitigating its social and environmental impact and preventing future crises. In addition to effective regulations and reforms in the global economic and financial system, fundamental shifts towards a Green Welfare State and a holistic rights-based development paradigm are necessary.   Coping with current crises is impossible without the state playing a more active role.   Remedying the social and environmental impacts of the crisis and overcoming the structural problems of poverty and environmental destruction require an active employment policy, social security systems, and an economic policy in harmony with the environment and climate. To this end, three initiatives have been formulated within the United Nations system that governments ought to speedily implement:   First, in order to prevent the economic crisis from turning into a long-lasting, worldwide employment crisis, the Global Jobs Pact adopted by the ILO needs to be fully implemented. Combating unemployment needs to be a top priority for the governments. This applies in particular to the increasing levels of youth unemployment. Here, public investment in infrastructure, employment programmes that ought to be oriented on the ILO agenda for decent work and the introduction of minimum wages to counter the growing phenomenon of the working poor should be of top priority. An active employment policy must also deal with problems of increasing informal work arrangements and precarious employment relationships, both of which affect women.   Second, the ILO has pointed out that access to social security is a human right. But in times of crisis in particular, an effective social-security system is also economic and political necessity – reducing poverty, strengthening the purchasing power of people and hence domestic demand, and preventing social tension and societal conflicts. The ILO has developed the concept of a Global Social Protection Floor based on four pillars:   universal access to public healthcare for all; guaranteed state allowances for every child; universal basic pension provided by the state for persons in old age or with disabilities; guaranteed state support for unemployed and underemployed people living in poverty.   Such basic social security ought to exist in every country and would prevent people from falling into poverty as a result of economic crises.   Third, a massive investment in environmentally friendly technologies and measures to reduce energy consumption is required to limit the threat of climate change. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has taken up proposals for a Green New Deal and developed them into a global initiative. UNEP is calling on the governments to invest at least US$750 billion, about 25 percent of the stimulus packages worldwide, in five areas: improving energy efficiency of buildings; developing renewable energies; establishing sustainable transport systems; protecting the planet’s ecological infrastructure including freshwater systems, forests, soils and coral reefs; investment in sustainable agriculture, in particular organic farming.   Changes in politics are not enough. There is a need for a more fundamental change of the dominant development paradigm. The current crises reflect a model of development that is oriented on a modernization approach, blind to environmental and human rights issues and confusing economic growth with progress in society. The model regards combating poverty as a primarily technical challenge in which the category of social justice plays no role.   A coherent analysis of the common causes of the multiple crises and their interdependencies is needed now.   This presupposes overcoming the current fragmentation in the development discourse of politics, science and civil society. Depending on the respective actors, this discourse focuses on narrow topics such as poverty alleviation and millennium development goals, climate change, trade and investment, and human rights and conflicts.   A holistic model of development, based on six cornerstones, must be re-considered: environmental sustainability, social justice, economic efficiency, democratic participation, cultural diversity, international responsibility.   A model of this kind must be based on international law and universal human rights, including the rights of women and children.   In September, the UN General Assembly convenes an MDG Summit in New York. The next UN Summit on Sustainable Development will take place in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro – 20 years after the Earth Summit 1992. The time between these summits provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the obvious shortcomings of the traditional development and growth model – and promote discourse on new models of welfare and development.   (Jens Martens is director of the Global Policy Forum in Bonn, Germany. Below is a link to the Friedrich- Ebert-Stiftung, Dialogue on Globalization. Promoting an inclusive and responsive global policy approach – to shape globalization towards a direction to promote peace, democracy and social justice.   The program draws on the international network of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung – a German non-profit institution committed to the principles of social democracy with programs and partners in 100 countries. Links to the sites in Geneva, Berlin and New York offer a range of publications). Visit the related web page
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