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National News
Food crisis may worsen before it gets better, UN says
By Thalif Deen
Updated May 14, 2008 - 10:39:00 AM
UNITED NATIONS (IPS/GIN) - The spreading food crisis—triggered primarily by rising prices, declining outputs and growing scarcities worldwide—is threatening to impact heavily on the most vulnerable in society: women and children. The United Nations and international humanitarian organizations fear the crisis may get worse before its gets better.
“Even temporarily depriving children of the nutrients they need to grow and thrive can leave permanent scars in terms of their physical growth and intellectual potential,” said Andrew Thorne-Lyman, a nutritionist at the Rome-based World Food Program.
The UN Population Fund is particularly concerned with the impact of the current crisis on pregnant women and nursing mothers. “The fund was involved in providing food to such women in recent crises, including those in Moldova and Niger,” said Safiye Cagar, the UN Population Fund’s director of information and external relations. The current food shortages, she said, are bound to make providing this sort of assistance more difficult.
“Our offices are currently working with the UN Country Teams in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Haiti and Nigeria, responding to the consequences of the food crises there,” Ms. Cagar said.
Ann Veneman, executive director of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, warned that rising prices “will most affect the most vulnerable, including people depending on humanitarian assistance, orphans, those affected by HIV/AIDS, refugees and poor urban families.” She said the increase in food prices may not only slow down progress toward achieving the health and nutrition-related millennium development goals but may also reverse or negatively impact child-related social indicators.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, food prices worldwide have increased about 83 percent over the last three years, while the price of rice alone has skyrocketed by about 141 percent since January this year.
The U.S.-based Save the Children, a leading humanitarian organization, said the present crisis is bound to force more of the world’s poor children to go hungry, thereby endangering their current and long-term well-being.
Charles MacCormack, president and chief executive officer of Save the Children, said the increasing pressure on family budgets will have adverse ripple effects on the health, education and safety of children.
“We know from experience that higher food prices most adversely affect impoverished families, especially children,” he said, in a statement released April 28. Mr. MacCormack pointed out that the increasingly high cost of food is pushing more families into poverty and forcing them to make difficult decisions on how to spend their money. “Parents may cut back on the amount and quality of food for their families; pull children from school and send them to work; reduce spending on health care; or sell key productive assets in order to cope with their newly dire economic circumstances,” he said.
The survival and well-being of vulnerable children depend on meeting current and impending food shortages and on addressing the root causes of food insecurity, he added. “This crisis is going to get worse before it improves, and it is critical that families and communities have the food they need now and the tools to prepare for and respond to future food emergencies,” he added.
Mr. Thorne-Lyman of the World Food Program said data from Bangladesh in the 1990s show that as food prices rose, so did child malnutrition. He said families didn’t necessarily stop buying rice when the price went up—they just reduced their consumption of the vitamin and mineral-rich foods necessary to help children grow.
Ms. Cagar from the UN Population Fund said there were also risks that some poor women may be forced into transactional sex to meet their basic needs, as food prices increase and become less affordable to them and their families.
“This could also lead to an increase in violence, especially against female-headed households and among poor women,” she added. Ms. Cagar said the UN Population Fund is also deeply concerned that the food crisis can potentially generate emergencies and disasters, with massive movements of people.
“We respond to such emergencies with support and relief operations to address the urgent reproductive health needs of displaced populations,” she added.
Meanwhile, following an April 29 meeting with all UN agency heads in the Swiss capital of Bern, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the crisis has multiple effects, “with its most serious impact on the most vulnerable in the poorest countries.”
“We see mounting hunger and increasing evidence of malnutrition, which has severely strained the capacities of humanitarian agencies to meet humanitarian needs, especially as promised funding has not yet materialized,” he added.
The meeting was attended by heads of 26 UN agencies, including UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, World Food Program, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Program, the International Labor Organization, and the UN’s sister institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Secretary-General Ban said, “I am very pleased today to have with me, as a symbol of the solidarity of the entire United Nations system, some of the leaders of the key institutions in the United Nations on the front line in dealing with food security.”
“We have agreed on a series of concrete measures that need to be taken in the short, medium and long terms.”
He said the first and immediate priority issue that all the leaders agreed on “was that we must feed the hungry.”
The joint meeting called upon the international community, and in particular upon developed countries, to urgently and fully fund the emergency requirement of $755 million for the World Food Program.
“Without full funding of these emergency requirements, we risk again the specter of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale,” he said. “We anticipate that additional funding will be required.”
