News

The planet can produce enough food to feed all of its people a European diet several times over, but the global food crisis persists due in a large part to such misplaced government priorities as the push for biofuels, a Netherlands-based doctor of economics said in Saskatoon Wednesday. What’s more, said Roel Jongeneel of the Wageningen University, the nine billion people expected to populate the planet in 2050 can still be fed a healthy diet with plenty of food left over if world leaders focus more on protecting agriculture and less on growing grains for use as transportation fuels.

”The blatant absence of the heads of state of the G8 countries... was one of the key causes of the total failure of this summit,” La Via Campesina said in a statement, adding that it showed ”an enormous lack of responsibility to resolve this deepening hunger crisis.” ”There were no measures to stop the devastating effects of corporate agriculture or to support domestic peasant-based food production,” said the coalition of groups advocating family farm-based sustainable agriculture.

At the Rome Food Summit which opened yesterday, Cardinal Napier, Archbishop of Durban, said: ”I have the impression that this organization does not know what the real problems of nutrition in Africa are. Africans do not need GMOs (genetically modified organisms), but water. We have our crops that grow well without genetic modifications, as long as you give them enough water. Well help us to build wells, dams and aqueducts; GMOs do not need it.”

LONDON - The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday. At United Nations climate talks in Barcelona last week negotiators from developed countries said the world would need an extra six to 12 months to agree a legally binding, global deal to cut carbon emissions beyond a planned December deadline. The IEA, energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries, said the world must act urgently to put greenhouse gases on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

A strategic forecast paper of "Deutsche Bank Research", Germany's leading Bank's think tank, comprising main findings of recent agricultural assessments and market reserach, has come to conclusions similar to the IAASTDs main findings. The paper, entitled The global food equation: Food security in an environment of increasing scarcity recommends heavy investment in smallholder farmers and rural infrastructure as well as public R&D in this field, an ecological adaptation of agriculture and major institutional change.

In an open letter to the FAO CSO representatives from around the world expressed concern that the World Food Organisation's high level expert meeting "how to feed the world 2050" on October 12-13 2009 did not draw from the major groundwork conducted by the IAASTD and was about to ignore the Assessment's key findings. In a response, Hafez Ghanem, FAO Assistant Director-General assured the CSOs that the IAASTD was indeed taken into account, would be presented at the meeting and was now linked to it's key background documents.

Biofuels production today can be more harmful than help-
ful, says the Worldwatch Insti-tute’s ‘Red, White, and Green: Transforming US Biofuels’ report coauthor Jane Earley.

Indigenous peoples risk losing control over their traditional knowledge if the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) insists on strict standards for managing access to information.

Olivier De Schutter: UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food

CSD-17 presents a unique opportunity for global governance to rise above the selfish interests of individual countries and regional blocks to work towards sustainable development worldwide, writes Nnimmo Bassey.

But, he warns, a complicated negotiation text lacking in ideas to galvanise nations into acting in solidarity, is likely to maintain the status quo. Bassey expresses dismay at G-77 references to 'national laws and cultural contexts' when the Commission for Sustainable Development 'should be raising the bar, not subjecting universal ideals to parochial local regimes'. Bassey suggests that restoring confidence in global governance and democracy is an important part of tackling the food, climate and economic crises on every delegates' mind. What is even more problematic to the negotiations, however, is the lack of unanimity in defining what 'sustainability' actually is.