By KUNA,
London : The world “cannot afford to fail” to deal with the international food crisis, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned Tuesday as heads of state meet for a UN summit to address soaring prices.
The UNs Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is hosting the meeting in Rome, has urged wealthy nations to use the summit to agree “urgent and concrete action” to address rising malnutrition rates.
In a joint article with his Spanish counterpart Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, published in a Spanish newspaper, Brown said it was “vital” that the three-day summit agreed measures to increase food production and agricultural productivity in the world’s poorest countries.
The British leader said immediate action was essential, with 9,000 under-fives dying each day due to malnutrition-related illnesses, according to extracts of the article released by Downing Street today.
“The fact that food prices have reached record levels can only worsen these already devastating figures”, the two leaders wrote.
“For the poorest quarter of the global population, three-quarters of their income is now taken up by the costs of food”.
“According to the World Bank, the success in reducing world poverty during the last seven years could be jeopardised”.
“Immediate action is essential”, they said.
The Rome conference should mark “the start of a co-ordinated and integrated international response to overcome the global food crisis”, they continued.
The Premiers welcomed the creation of a UN task force and the response to aid appeals but said more had to be done to protect the vulnerable, especially children, to invest in local agriculture and to agree a new world trade deal.
“We need to join efforts in these coming months to ensure that, by the UN Millennium Development Goals Summit on September 25, the international community has agreed a co-ordinated approach to handling this crisis”.
“We will redouble our collective effort. We cannot afford to fail”, they added.
Meanwhile, debt campaigners here called for affected countries to be granted a moratorium on repayments and for Haiti, which has been hit by food riots, to have its 1.3 billion dollars debt cancelled.
The major UK charities “Christian Aid” and “Jubilee Debt Campaign” said an emergency World Bank grant to Haiti, announced last Friday, was a “sticking plaster” that would only cover 10 weeks of debt repayments.
Jubilee director Nick Dearden said in a statement “It is shocking that while many millions of people in the world are going short of food, their governments are still being forced to shell out millions of pounds a week to rich countries and banks”.