Annan: Financial crisis undercuts global food aid

"The financial crisis deserves urgent attention and focus. But so does the question of hunger," says Annan

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
kofi annan 224-88 (photo credit: )
kofi annan 224-88
(photo credit: )
Wealthy nations are reneging on commitments to help feed the world's hungry, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has told an international conference on combating starvation. Annan, speaking on World Food Day, said 10,000 children in the Third World would die from malnutrition on Thursday alone. And this, he said, should be viewed as a tragedy as great as the collapse of a bank. "The financial crisis deserves urgent attention and focus. But so does the question of hunger. Millions are liable to die (this year). Is that any less urgent?" Annan told journalists on Thursday at the Fighting Hunger conference, attended by 200 foreign-aid experts from Europe, Africa and the United States. "I agree that politicians being what they are, and under pressure from their own voters to improve their own local economic conditions - they will take their eyes off of poverty," he said. Annan questioned whether governments were really serious when they proclaimed aid commitments at a Group of Eight summit in Scotland in 2005 and at a 181-nation Food Summit in Rome in June. The G-8 meeting produced promises to boost development aid to Africa to $50 billion by 2010. The Rome Food Summit ended with nations committing $12 b. toward measures to modernize agricultural practices, including promises to buy more food from small African farmers and to help them boost their yields with fertilizer, high-tech seeds, irrigation and mechanical equipment. If those promises were kept, Third World hunger would decline, Annan said. Instead, hunger experts at the conference agreed that the current number of 920 million hungry worldwide is likely to grow this year to about 970 m. Annan suggested that the $12 b. pledge was an illusion. "How much of that $12 b. has been paid out? How much of that $12 b. was new money? How much of it had been pledged before and pledged again?" he asked. Annan declined to identify specific nations and their financial shortcomings on aid. So did several representatives of aid organizations at Thursday's conference. All said it was foolish to risk annoying potential sources of funding. In Rome on Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday that the world has enough resources to feed its growing population and blamed world hunger partly on corruption, military spending and the "egoism" of nations. Rich countries continue a "race for consumption" even as food becomes more scarce in poorer regions of the planet, the pope said in a message to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Opening the Food Day ceremony in Rome, the organization's director-general, Jacques Diouf, said only 10 percent of the $22 b. that was pledged by nations this year to fight food shortages has so far materialized, mainly for emergency aid. In Dublin, US economist Jeffrey Sachs, a development expert and special adviser to both Annan and his successor, US Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said virtually all of the world's wealthiest countries have talked big and delivered far less. "It's easy to give a big speech, and very hard to track the money afterward," said Sachs, a Columbia University professor who has promoted the idea of pooling international donations for modernizing Third World agriculture into a single, publicly visible fund. He said the Rome promises had been "nearly a washout" so far, with only a single major donation - about $33 m. from Australia - banked and earmarked for future use in developing agriculture. He said virtually no major country was close to meeting the United Nations' goal of committing 0.7% of gross domestic product to foreign aid. He said the biggest donor, the United States, was also "the No. 1 offender" - because its aid equals just 0.16% of its GDP, the lowest on the table. "The United States, Japan, Italy and to a slightly lesser degree France and Germany, are nowhere near where they should be. Virtually all of the world's wealthy countries have made promises that they have yet to deliver [on]. And our international system does not have any enforcement system," he said, noting that it was up to individual nations to document whether their pledged money is actually spent and how.