Woldwide famine

The food crisis that's currently shaking the planet up (in the Middle East, in Asia, and more precisely in about forty African countries) could have been foreshadowed if only we had paid more attention to the warnings of organisations such as The PAM and the FAO. It would today be inappropriate to talk about this crisis, the causes of which are multiple, but I strongly feel we could experience a new crisis if the international community doesn't face the major issues and organize several coordinated actions that are compulsory in order for the starvation, of a world we thought was now protected, to stop.

Of course, among the reasons of such a crisis are the climatic conditions that are a burden for countries producing cereals - floods, unusual drought - and their demographic growth. But we can also evoke problems linked with governance and the lack of a policy of prevention. Very few countries happen to have a provident policy as regards food which would include the constitution of a safe stock and the boosting of the development of the food-producing agriculture. Added to that the effects of aids from some rich countries to their farmers and the development of industrial cultures (cotton…), the quotation of which is falling: all of this had dreadful effect for the peasant world, alongside biofuels - whether they use food-producing plants or not - that take a lot of arable space.
Over the last decades, an important amount of aids for projects of good governance have been given in developing countries, while food-producing was abandoned. It thus turned poor countries that had been exporting food into countries into countries dependent on expensive cereal imports because of both the rise of the price of oil and the speculation for essential products. We are facing both an unbearable moral matter and a severe economic issue.

As regards what may be the solutions, there are immediate measures that need be taken for short urgent and medium term results. The food crisis that's being undergone in several developing countries of Asia and Africa needs an increase of the urgent food help through a reaction of solidarity of the richest countries.

Meanwhile, we need to subsidize developing countries and reorganize the circulation of essential products by giving back its pedigree to cereal agriculture. It will obviously imply a more important investment in this area in order to reconstruct a genuine rural economy with the disposal of agricultural equipment, and actions lead over the substructures : irrigation, rural roads, stocking and packaging facilities and the revision of the trade structure with more profitable fares for poor farmers.

That's why we hope the Leaders of the world will apply the policies, strategies and programs that are necessary to fulfil those challenges and will use their influence to make the laws of the international trade of agricultural produce fairer.

I bet that we will know how to mobilize against what the PAM calls a "silent tsunami" that threatens to plunge dozen of million of people into starvation. It is one of the biggest challenges in World History. The fight against poverty is not the fight against the Poor but a genuine campaign of international solidarity for a better distribution of wealth: We have the power to commit to this cause.