AIDS, soil salination and the challenges of feeding an
increasingly urban world are among a range of issues which will be discussed at next week’s World Food Summit as it plans to cut world hunger by half before 2015.
Leaders and officials from more than 180 countries will hear how AIDS is no longer a health problem alone but is having an increasing impact on food production and the ability of rural people to make a
living.
A Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) document prepared for the summit says HIV/AIDS has moved out of urban areas into rural communities, devastating thousands of farming communities in developing countries.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s worst hit region, over half of the 28 million people with AIDS live in rural areas, UN figures show.
FAO warned in the document, published last month, that the worst affected African countries could lose up to 26% of their agricultural labour force within two decades.
Studies carried out in Kenya and Uganda show that households affected by AIDS or HIV produce and consume less food.
But the biggest task of the ‘World Food Summit, five years later’ will be to generate the political will to boost flagging efforts to cut the number of the world’s hungry by half, or 400 million people, by 2015.
The ambitious target was set by the last World Food Summit in Rome in 1996.
”There are few signs of willingness on the part of both developing and developed countries to set aside the resources required to achieve the eradication of hunger,” FAO says in a preparatory document.
”The great danger is that the debate on poverty reduction strategies will continue in the corridors of power, delaying commitment to even the most obvious of actions, while more than 800 million people suffering from chronic undernourishment, many of them children, are deprived of the opportunity to live a full life.”
”The global cost of not eradicating hunger – in terms of conflict, recurrent emergencies, international crime, the drug trade, terrorism, clandestine migration and the premature death of those who are hungry – is enormous.”
The summit will also sound an alarm over the world’s growing urban population. In 2005, more than half the world’s people will live in cities, highlighting the strains of supplying them with safe and affordable food.
Olivio Argenti, an urban food security specialist with FAO, says urbanisation is eating up productive land, pushing food production further away from consumers, driving up costs.
Twenty cities now have a population of more than 10 million, FAO says. People in urban areas spend an average 30% more on food than their rural cousins, but consume fewer calories.
Urban farms are one way of countering the problem, but they face contamination risks.
”I recently visited an urban agricultural area in Mexico near a river into which all the sewage goes from the nearby village. They use the mud to prepare seed beds and the water to water the vegetables,” said Argenti.
”I asked the authorities if they were aware of the danger, and they said that they were not in a position to do anything because they didn’t have the financial or technical means.”
Agricultural issues like the threat posed by salination will also come up for discussion by world leaders, who will hear that around 10% of the world’s irrigated land has been damaged by salt.
Although only about 17% of all crop-producing land is irrigated, it provides about 40% of the world’s food.
FAO says salination, a build-up of salts in the soil which lowers yields and damages land, is reducing the world’s irrigated areas at the rate of one to two percent annually. – Sapa-AFP