Aid agency warns of ‘silent tsunami’ of hunger

Help on the way
President Bush has released $200 million in urgent aid. Britain pledged an immediate $59.7 million on Tuesday.

Even so, school feeding projects in Kenya and Cambodia have been scaled back and food aid has been cut in half in Tajikistan, Sheeran said.

Yet while angry street protesters call for immediate action, long term solutions are likely to be slow, costly and complicated, experts warn.

And evolving diets among burgeoning middle classes in India and China will help double the demand for food — particularly grain intensive meat and dairy products — by 2030, the World Bank says.

Robert Zoellick, the bank's head, claims as many as 100 million people could be forced deeper into poverty. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said rising food costs threaten to cancel strides made toward the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015.

"Now is not too soon to be thinking about the longer-term solutions," said Alex Evans, a former adviser to Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.

He said world leaders must help increase food production, rethink their push on biofuels — which many blame for pushing up food prices — and consider anew the once taboo topic of growing genetically modified crops.

Hardest land to farm
But Evans, now a visiting fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, said increasing the amount of land that can be farmed in the developing world will be arduous.

"It's almost like new oil or gas fields; they'll tend to be the hardest to reach places, that need new roads and new infrastructure to be viable," he said.

The will to increase food production exists, as does most of the necessary skills, but there are major obstacles, including a lack of government investment in agriculture and — in Africa particularly — a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation and access to markets.

"Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren't connected to markets," said Lawrence Haddad, an economist and director of Britain's Institute of Development Studies. "They find there are no chilling plants for milk and no grinding mills for coffee."

Haddad said the likely impact of food price increases should have been anticipated. "The fact no one has previously made the link between agriculture and poverty is quite incredible," he said.

Looking at genetically modified crops
Just as new land for farming is available in Russia and Brazil, new genetically modified crops resistant to drought, or which deliver additional nutrients, could be better targeted to different regions of the developing world, Evans said. "The solutions are more nuanced than we previously thought," he added.

Sheeran said developing world governments, particularly in Africa, will need to dedicate at least 10 percent of future budgets to agriculture to boost global production.

Some experts predict other countries could follow the example of Pakistan, which has revived the use of ration cards for subsidized wheat.

The production of biofuels also needs to be urgently re-examined, Brown said.

He acknowledged that Britain this month introduced targets aimed at producing 5 percent of transport fuel from biofuels by 2010, but said his government and others should review their policies.

Production of biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up land available to grow crops for food.

Feeling the effects in West
Brown said the impact of the food crisis won't just be felt in the developing world, but also in the checkout lane of Western supermarkets. "It it is not surprising that we see our shopping bills go up," Brown said.

Many analysts, including Britain's opposition leader David Cameron, claim that people in the West will need to eat less meat — and consume, or waste, less food in general. Some expect the shift in attitudes to herald the end of supermarket giveaways and cost-cutting grocery stores that stack goods to the ceiling and sell in bulk.

Citizens in the West, China and India must realize that the meat on their plate and biofuels in their expensive cars carry a cost for those in the developing world, Evans said.

Sheeran believes many already understand the impact. "Much of the world is waking up to the fact that food does not spontaneously appear on grocery store shelves," she said.

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