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Food shortage: Rich Nations Condemned

This report, in IHT, of a UN conference presently underway seeking to address the shortage of food in the world is more than troubling:

"Resolving the global food crisis could cost as much as $30 billion a year, and wealthier nations are doing little to help developing nations face the problem, United Nations officials said here on Tuesday.

Jacques Diouf, director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, convened a three-day summit meeting attended by dozens of world leaders. He sharply criticized wealthy nations who he said were cutting spending on agriculture programs for the world's poor and ignoring the loss of rain forests while spending billions on carbon markets, subsidies for their own farmers and biofuel production.

"The developing countries did, in fact, forge policies, strategies and programs that - if they had received appropriate funding - would have given us world food security," Diouf said, adding that the international community finally mobilized to help after images of food riots and hunger emerged in the media. He said there had been plenty of meetings on the need for anti-hunger programs and agricultural development in poor nations in the last decade, but not enough money to make them a reality."

Continue to read the piece here.

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