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Protecting poor from rising food prices must be top priority -IICA

The protection of the most vulnerable sections of society from the impact of continually rising food prices and the increase in domestic food production to satisfy demand ought to be one of the “top priorities” on the agendas of governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a paper released by the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA).

The IICA paper posits that the current sustained increases in food prices poses a real danger of further exacerbating the already high levels of poverty and malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean. And according to the IICA paper the current food crisis will compromise the ability of countries in the hemisphere “to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by 50 per cent by 2015.”

The paper titled ‘Response to Rising Food Prices: Placing Agriculture and Food Security as Top Priorities on the National Food Agenda’ expresses concern over the World Bank assessment that rising food prices “is a trend that that is likely to persist in the medium term” adding that governments, private sectors and civic society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean must seek to secure “up-to-date technical and scientific knowledge to help them formulate investment strategies and national, regional and hemispheric policies to help boost food and energy security.

And in its advocacy of greater regional and hemispheric attention to biofuels as an alternative source of energy the IICA paper advocates the use of non-cereal resources, including sugar cane. This approach to alternative energy production, the paper says poses no threat to food security.
IICA has already ‘rolled out’ a plan to support the emergency response of countries in the hemisphere to the global food and fuel crises. ”A viable approach to the so-called ‘food versus fuel’ predicament would be to diversify the feedstock and the technology from which biofuels are produced, concentrating on products with a long-standing and positive track record such as sugar cane,” the paper says.

IICA’s perspective on the global food crisis and its envisaged initiatives in support of the hemispheric response has been deliberated on at the levels of both the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Central to the perspective of IICA is the view that “agricultural research and investment in new technology” are critical components of the response to the food and fuel crises.

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