By Jessica Reed
Today is World Food Day 2006:
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day each year on 16 October (...) foreign aid for agriculture and rural development has continued to decline. From a total of over US$9 billion per year in the early 1980s, it fell to less than US$5 billion in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, an estimated 854 million people around the world remain undernourished.
Starvation remains the primary cause of death worldwide: an average of 25.000 people die everyday from malnutrition, and as much as 850 millions suffer from it. This year's theme is "Investing in agriculture for food security". This week the organisation has called for more investements in agriculture so as to tackle hunger; public investment in this field has been decreasing at an alarming rate for the past twenty years. Most people suffering from malnutrition live in rural aeras, and cannot rely on good infrastructures to rely on. Poor access to water, electricity and roads is limiting both the productivity and growth of rural zones.
Sometimes the aid provided (coupled with misinformed agricultural advices) turns out to be a poisonous gift worsening the food crisis. When in 2002 the US shipped tons of genetically modified maize to Malawi and most southern Africa, many voiced their discontempt: GM seeds have to be bought again each year since farmers cannot save them from the previous harvest - their only option is to keep on buying American seeds at higher prices. This creates a system of dependency which aggravates the issue instead of providing poor countries with new ways to handle their critical situation: if GM seed manufacturing companies may benefit from the arrangement, it makes little doubt that farmers will not.
Back in 2005, the yearly initiative might be entached by Robert Mugabe's all expenses-paid visit to the FAO organisation in Rome: the Zimbabwean president had said that his people "are not hungry, they just can't eat their favorite foods."
Elsewhere: Feeding Minds, an international classroom for exploring the problems of hunger.
