UN warns of civil war on food crisis

PARIS, April 26, 2008 (AFP) UN food agency chief Jacques Diouf yesterday warned of civil war in some countries because of global food shortages and called for a revamp of the international food system.

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation said on France 24 television that international leaders had failed to act on warnings from his agency leading to what he called a “predictable catastrophe”.

Diouf said that “elected governments” must take “primary responsibility” before their people.

While demonstrations and riots over rising prices of staples such as rice and corn have hit the government in Haiti, Diouf said he sees “civil war” as a potential danger for countries in sub-Saharan Africa but also in Asia and Latin America.

Asked if he agreed with International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s assessment that “those kind of questions sometimes end in war,” Diouf said “with the qualification, civil war”.

“Within countries, if, once again, all the necessary measures are not taken, there risks being clashes. We know there have already been deaths in some countries.”
Diouf went on: “Unfortunately, we always wait until there is a catastrophe in this world before we react.”

Unrest tied to the food inflation has already erupted in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Diouf bemoaned the competing politics of different international organisations, sometimes under the same UN umbrella, and said this had often made the implementation of FAO policies fall foul to those of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“It’s true that the World Bank and the (IMF) have, over the past two decades, policies which have dismantled systems put in place to protect farmers in Third World countries, notably in Africa,” he said.

“(But) I should say that the World Bank has done a mea culpa, because it has recognised its policies in Africa were not good and that it has to change them.”
However, he denied that price rises of up to 120% in rice’s case would prove beneficial to developing world farmers. 

There has to be investment in the management of water,” he said. “In Africa, on 96% of land, production is dependent upon rainfall. “When you factor in poor rural transport networks ... and inadequate storage facilities, (these countries) lose between 40 and 60% of production each year.

The FAO director-general welcomed an idea for global institutions to establish a food security fund, in the way the international community rallied to battle Aids from the 1980s. – AFP