Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is greeted by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director General Jacques Diouf (R) on his arrival at a U.N. crisis summit on rising food prices in Rome June 3, 2008. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    ROME, June 3 (Xinhua) -- The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday appealed to world leaders for 30 billion U.S. dollars a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food.

    In a speech at the opening of a summit called to defuse the current world food crisis, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf noted that in 2006, the world spent 1,200 billion dollars on arms while food wasted in a single country could cost 100 billion dollars and excess consumption by the world's obese amounted to 20 billion dollars.

    "Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find 30 billion dollars a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?" Diouf said.

    "The structural solution to the problem of food security in the world lies in increasing production and productivity in the low-income, food-deficit countries," he said.

    This called for "innovative and imaginative solutions," including "partnership agreements ... between countries that have financial resources, management capabilities and technologies, and countries that have land, water and human resources," he said.

    The current world food crisis had already had "tragic political and social consequences in different countries" and could further "endanger world peace and security," Diouf said.

    But the crisis was in essence a "chronicle of disaster foretold," he noted. Despite the World Food Summit's solemn pledge in 1996 to halve world food hunger by 2015, resources to finance agricultural programs in developing countries had not only failed to rise but decreased significantly since then.

    In cooperation with FAO, developing countries did in fact prepare policies, strategies and programs that, if they had received appropriate funding, would have ensured world food security.

    But, he continued, "today the facts speak for themselves: from 1980 to 2005 aid to agriculture fell from 8 billion dollars in 1984 to 3.4 billion dollars in 2004, representing a reduction in real terms of 58 percent."

    Agriculture's share of Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell from 17 percent in 1980 to 3 percent in 2006, the FAO chief added.

    The director-general said he had alerted public opinion as far back as last September to the risks of social and political unrest due to hunger and that in December he had appealed for 1.7 billion dollars to help overcome the crisis by facilitating farmers' access to seeds, fertilizer, animal feed and other inputs.

    But the appeal had generally fallen on deaf ears, despite broad press coverage and correspondence with FAO members and financial institutions, he said.

    "Important today is to realize that the time for talking is long past," he stressed. "Now is the time for action".

    There were 862 million people in the world without adequate access to food, said the director-general, adding that the current food crisis went beyond the traditional humanitarian dimension because it also affected developed countries, where it fuelled inflation.

    "If we do not urgently take the courageous decisions that are required in the present circumstances, the restrictive measures taken by producing countries to meet the needs of their populations, the impact of climate change and speculation on futures markets will place the world in a dangerous situation," Diouf warned.