G20 leaders urged to act on food security

LOS CABOS, Mexico - Leaders who are to attend the summit of the Group of Twenty (G20) have been urged to make good on their commitment to food security, despite the urgency of European financial crisis.

Ahead of the G20 Leaders' summit, which runs Monday and Tuesday in Los Cabos, a seaside resort in Mexico, Felipe Calderon, president of the host nation Mexico, issued a list of five priorities for the summit: food security, green growth, financial stability, improved financial architecture and growth-centered economic reform.

With worries about the eurozone, and especially Greece growing, however, many fear that these ideas will be swept aside.

"All indications are that the crisis in Europe is going to dominate talks," said Sameer Dossani, the advocacy coordinator for Action Aid International, a non-governmental organization dedicated to anti-poverty, in an interview with Xinhua on Sunday. He said with the billion people going hungry worldwide, however, food security "is equally if not more important."

The European crisis has to be solved, because it is turning into a serious problem for developing nations, which are already suffering volatile food prices and cuts in international aid, said Carlos Zarco, spokesman for Oxfam, a British NGO dedicated to food security, in an interview via email. He insisted it was not enough for the G20 to fix the European crisis.

At the last G20 summit held last November in French coastal city of Cannes, the G20 decided to launch a database seeking to make food markets more transparent by publishing data detailing commodities markets transactions.

"More transparency is not a bad thing, but it could be that we just end up with better data on the volatility rather than stopping it," Dossani said.

The most recent world food crisis was in 2008, when fund managers and traders sold equities and bonds and bought energy and commodities fearing a financial crisis in the United States. More than 20 nations suffered unrest as food prices soared, even though the supply of basic foodstuffs was little changed.

Europe could help ease the food crisis by cutting subsidies to biofuels, because these are drawing land and farm produce resources away from food production, contended Dossani, who disclosed Europe increased subsidies to biofuels from 2007 to 2010, even as its domestic financial problems intensified.