As government ministers, international organisations and
representatives of the food industry meet in London today to discuss the world food crisis and the UK government announces a new aid package to address food price rises, ActionAid’s Dr Claire
Melamed asks who loses and who gains.
She said: “Part of the answer to the food crisis lies in the world economy. Trade and aid policies imposed by rich countries have conspired to
make developing countries more dependent on international markets.
“The developing world has been encouraged to open its markets to food imports to meet consumer needs while farmers
have been all but abandoned by aid donors. Many countries have consequently become net food importers. This has proved to be disastrous.
“It's the poor, both in the countryside
and the cities, who suffer the most with over 850 million people going hungry on a daily basis.
“Meanwhile as trade is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we see
multinational agri-business such as Cargill and Nestle making gargantuan profits out of a situation that means misery for pretty much everyone else.”
Poor countries now spend
twice as much of their foreign exchange on food imports as they did in 2000 whilst aid for agriculture is less than half what it was in 1984.
ActionAid is calling for more aid to boost
agricultural sectors and for poor countries to be enabled once more to increase their agricultural productivity through trade rules that help their farmers.
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
