"This is a fight we cannot afford to lose, the enemy is hunger", so said Ban Ki Moon yesterday in Rome. However his words fell on deaf ears. So far only a measly 3 billions has been "promised" to feed the 900 million who are on the verge of starvation. Yesterday I reported that a figure of an annual 30 billion has been calculated by the UN as the ballpark figure to address world hunger. Unfortunately this conference has been highjacked by a brace of tyrants, namely the odious Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and the bearded buffoon from Iran, Ahmadinejad, who both managed to accuse the West for their ills. Additionally, Latin American countries are refusing to sign a declaration on dealing with the world food crisis, delegates at a UN food summit have told journalists (this is still developing) as a final declaration had been set to be released at 1500 GMT. Don't hold your breath.
Reading through several online news (BBC, EuroNews, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel), Senior European officials say some of those countries, prompted by Brazil, will not sign a final statement which might "demonise" biofuels. Brazil - one of the main biofuels producers - has fiercely defended its right to grow sugarcane for ethanol.
"All the regions without exception have accepted the language of the draft declaration. All countries and regions are unhappy with some elements, the EU is unhappy with the mentions of trade, for example, but they have compromised. But the Latin Americans are not budging,"
the official added.
Ban Ki Moon praised French President Nicolas Sarkozy for pledging more than $1.5 billion over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity in Africa. Saudi Arabia has already announced it is giving around $500 million to the World Food Program to deal with the emergency in the short term, and the United States has committed some $5 billion over the next two years, much of it to help find long-term solutions. The leaders quickly laid out their disagreements on a key issue: how much the rush for environmentally friendly biofuels is contributing to soaring prices that are causing hunger and unrest worldwide. Discussion of whether to scale back or push ahead with the introduction of biofuels - fuels made from sugar cane, corn and other crops - is likely to weigh heavily on attempts to come up with a global strategy to solve the crisis.
Proponents say the fuels are a way to combat climate change and rising oil prices, while others argue they accelerate global warming by encouraging deforestation and heavily contribute to the commodities price hike by diverting production from food crops to biofuel crops.
The president of Brazil, whose country's sugar cane has long been used to produce ethanol that fuels cars and trucks, delivered an impassioned defense of biofuels.
"It is frightening to see attempts to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between biofuels and the rise of food prices," said Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal."
The United States, which also tried to exonerate biofuels from the charge of rising prices, has been heavily subsidizing corn-based ethanol production. Last year I reported that the 27-nation European Union endorsed a plan calling for a 10-percent share of biofuels for road vehicles by 2020.
"In some cases, biofuel production is in competition with food supply," Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told the Rome summit on Tuesday. "We need to ensure that biofuel production is sustainable."
While agreeing that sustainability and innovation are needed, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer insisted that biofuels contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.
"The use of sustainable biofuels can increase energy security, foster economic development especially in rural areas, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily on food prices,"
Schafer said in his address. More money would go to cellulosic ethanol, made from plant matter. But even among countries like the U.S. and Brazil, there was little agreement on the best way to tap the energy source.
Understandably, Brazil's president lashed out at the U.S. approach, saying corn-based ethanol is less efficient than the fuel produced with sugar cane and that the former can only compete
"when it is shored up with subsidies and shielded behind tariffs."
In sharp contrast to this conference, anthropologist Timothy Jones renewed his call on the BBC (and Al Jazeera) this morning to stop wasting foodstuffs. His in-depth study revealed that almost half the food in the country goes to waste - a statistic that should alarm an industry that is struggling to achieve greater efficiency in order to salvage profits.
Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, has spent the last 10 years measuring food loss, including the last eight under a grant from the US department of agriculture (USDA). Jones started examining practices in farms and orchards, before going onto food production, retail, consumption and waste disposal. What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security
.
Food for thought. Tomorrow I'll report on the wording of the so-called "declaration".