UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will join key players from over 100 countries to discuss the urgent state of food insecurity at the UN headquarters in New York on Saturday.
Reports of acute malnutrition, a widespread lack of access to food and the insidious problem of climate irregularity have created "an extremely disturbing" situation for millions of people around the world, David Nabarro, the secretary-general's coordinator for the UN task force on the global food security crisis, told reporters on Friday afternoon.
"We know from past situations that unless concerted action can be taken, there will be increased levels of mortality associated with under nutrition," he said.
Nabarro, who is one of the most senior public health experts in the UN system, said the fundamental issue is not one of food shortage as the world is producing more food than ever before.
"There is not a need to be worrying about that now," he said, noting it will become a problem in 2050 when the population grows to 9 billion people.
The problem is one of who produces food and who can access it, he said.
"We are concerned with the productivity and income of roughly 500 million smallholder farmers," who are characterized by owning one to two hectares of rain-fed land, he said.
In Africa, for example, smallholder farmers produce 80 percent of the food consumed, and yet they lack access to new technologies and are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events.
Nabarro said the UN high-level inter-agency task force has been working over the past year on a new approach to food security.
"We're going to see a revolution in agriculture during the next five years," he said. "We're going to see an approach to agriculture that puts smallholder farmers ... especially women farmers at the top of the agenda."
"We're going to see a transformation of markets and trading systems in agriculture and food so they work more in the interest of poor people and their countries," he said, noting an international push for such changes.
This year, the Horn of Africa is particularly plagued by malnutrition and food insecurity. The World Food Program struggles to provide food assistance to millions in the region because of a budget shortfall of 1 billion U.S. dollars, said Nabarro.
Without a concerted effort to structurally change agricultural production and access, the world will not achieve the first Millennium Development Goal -- to end poverty and hunger.
Global efforts to achieve food security often seems like something from "Alice through the Looking Glass," a bizarre and often contradictory set of policies.
On the one hand, at the Group of Eight meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, leaders pledged 20 billion U.S. dollars in funding over the next three years to tackle increasing levels of food and nutrition in security exacerbated by the economic contraction.
Yet on the other hand, it is no secret that subsidies for farmers in the United States and Europe destabilize opportunities for farmers in developing countries to become self-sufficient.
"There is no doubt that one of the underlying challenges that we face in food is that for many years there have been a set of practices adopted by some countries which have created difficult market conditions for producers of both grain and livestock from developing countries," he said, referring in part to subsidies.
"One of the issues that is right at the center of the work of our task force is attention to the behavior of food markets and trading practices, and seeking the right political solution to some of these distorting factors," he said.
But with renewed interest from the international community, Nabarro said "This might be the beginning of a period in which we can make a long-term shift towards trying to deal with the chronic problem of food insecurity in our world, one that's proved so difficult to tackle in the last two or three decades."
