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Africa: We Must Act On Food Crisis Now
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
OPINION
6 May 2008
Posted to the web 6 May 2008
Ban Ki-moon
Worldwide, too many people still go hungry. More than half a million women die, needlessly, in childbirth each year. Some 10 million children die every year from preventable diseases, half of them in Africa. This is deplorable and unacceptable.
Now comes another blow, seemingly out of the blue. But it is not totally out of the blue. It was known that we predicted even two-three years ago that this crisis would come.
I am sorry that the international community had not listened more attentively. That is the challenge of rising food prices which is a crisis for the most vulnerable populations. If not managed properly, it could touch off a cascade of related crises affecting trade, economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world.
We are familiar with the causes: rising oil prices, growing global demand, bad trade policies, bad weather, panic buying and speculation, the new craze of biofuels derived from food products and so on and so on.
We all know the effect on markets: how the price of basic foodstuff seems to hit new records almost daily, how the price of rice in particular has gone from $400 a tonne some weeks ago, now $1000 a tonne.
Even in Europe and the United States, consumers are grumbling. But imagine the situation of those living on $1 a day, who might spend two-thirds of their income on food.
In Liberia last week, I heard how people have stopped purchasing imported rice by the bag. Instead, they increasingly buy it by the cup-because that is all they can afford.
It is worth remembering that Liberia's descent into chaos began in 1979, with food riots. In Cote d'Ivoire, political leaders told me how they worry that the crisis in food could create social unrest and undermine their efforts to build real democracy.
In Burkina Faso, the president told me how desperately the nation needs help, where so many people live on simply $1 a day or less. One senior government official spoke to me especially forcefully. The crisis in food, he said, is a greater threat by far than terrorism. "It makes people doubt their dignity as men," he said.
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That is why we must act, with a greater sense of urgency and decisiveness.
In the Rift Valley, the bread basket of East Africa, farmers are planting only a third of what they did last year because they cannot afford fertiliser, which is also sky-rocketing in price. Together, we must act, immediately. We must give small farmers the support they need to assure their next harvest.
Mr Ban is the UN Secretary-General.
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