By Jonathan Lynn DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 28 (Reuters) - People in developing countries still face a danger of food shortages despite falls in commodity prices, the head of international aid and development agency Oxfam said on Wednesday. Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam, expressed her concern even though commodity prices have come down from the peak they hit last year."None of us are expecting it (the price level) to go down to where it was, not least because we're in a food scarcity world now," she told Reuters in an interview during the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. "The scarcity stuff is going to go in the long term, and certainly for the poorest people any increase in food prices when you're spending 70-80 percent of your income on food is really a dramatic effect." Stocking's comments followed a warning by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday that rich nations must do more to prevent the economic crisis adding to the 1 billion people already going hungry. [ID:nLR269906] Oxfam expects many countries to face difficulties in the next few months, including ones such as Zimbabwe and Afghanistan which will enter the "lean season" between crops. Stocking was encouraged by a new emphasis since last year on fostering development in agriculture, including smallholder farming, with the World Bank discussing putting money into agricultural development for the first time in 25 years. "In 2008 there was a dramatic turnaround in the view of global policymakers about what developing countries needed to do," she said. But she said it was important that global efforts to boost agriculture focused on feeding hungry people and not developing agribusinesses in the corporate sector. Stocking said there was a real chance that developing countries could boost food production. But she said this would require work to increase productivity, for instance through improved and more suitable seeds, policy issues such as land rights, group organisation to allow production at scale, and better infrastructure. It was also important that developing countries have the freedom to make their own food policy decisions, for instance intervening in the market with grain banks, she said. Commodities exporters such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia have been hurt by the fall in raw materials prices. "Some countries are much less affected because they have not moved into the global economy in quite the same way, but we're expecting them to be hit in different ways, in particular through the decline in remittances," Stocking said. (For a recent Oxfam report on the food crisis, click on: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/conflict_disasters/bp127_billion_hungry_people.html ) (For full coverage, blogs and TV from Davos go to http://www.reuters.com/davos) (Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; editing by Timothy Heritage
A farmer gathers arid corn crops on his farm in Kwale January 27, 2009. Kenya has scrapped import duty on maize to alleviate food shortages after drought cut production of the ...
