Global food crisis not easy or cheap to solve

World leaders meeting for three days in Rome to consider solutions to increasing hunger worldwide due to rising food prices came face-to-face with reality: A price tag of $30 billion a year.

But as Pope Benedict XVI said in a message to the summit conference, “Hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable in a world which, in reality, has sufficient production levels, the resources, and the know-how to put an end to these tragedies.”

Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which hosted the summit, was just as pointed in his assessment of the current situation, especially in poor countries.

“The problem of food insecurity is a political one,” Diouf was quoted by the New York Times as saying. “It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it is those choices made by governments that determine the allocation of resources.”

The world leaders forged a compromise on a strategy to combat the crisis of increasing hunger that calls for stepped up food production, reduced trade restrictions and more research on the issue of biofuels.

This last item is the most contentious because it is driven by the issue of climate change and rising oil prices. Biofuels made from sugar cane, corn and other crops have meant a diversion of traditional food sources.

For example, the U.S. has been subsidizing corn-based ethanol production, while the European Union adopted a plan last year calling for biofuels to make up 10 percent of the fuel for road vehicles by 2020.

Indepth study

The challenges and opportunities posed by biofuels will be studied in-depth by the United Nations. The goal is to ensure that production and use of biofuels is sustainable.

But while the discussions in Rome were couched in heady diplomatic language, the reason for the summit was much more straightforward: The haves have a moral responsibility to care for the have-nots.

Countries that in normal times suffer widespread starvation due to poverty find themselves in greater dire straits as a result of droughts, which have affected crop yields, the increased demand for food by the exploding middle classes, especially in China and India, and increasing production of ethanol and other biofuels.

Participants at the conference pledged to deliver more food aid to starving people around the world, provide small farmers with seeds and fertilizers, scrap export bans and restrictions and vastly increase agriculture research and outreach programs to improve crop production, according to the New York Times.

But why should the United States and other western countries care what happens to people in countries that are not important to their national interests? Because hunger breeds contempt, which then becomes the fuse that ignites civil unrest.

Indeed, countries around the world have already experienced rioting because of food shortages.

The U.S. and other developed nations should also care because the death of even one human being due to starvation in the midst of so much wealth is morally unacceptable.