BANGKOK (AlertNet) Â? Agriculture in developing nations needs massive investment of over $200 billion each year to provide enough food for the world's growing population by 2050, the United Nations said this week.
Launching a global online campaign against hunger, Hiroyuki Konuma, Asia-Pacific representative for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), warned that failure to deliver could lead to violence.
"We will have real problems with the public if there's a shortage of food," he told reporters in Bangkok. "People will start to attack the shops to steal food, and this happened in Somalia during the shortage of rice two years ago. It will really create real social unrest."
Already the tally of chronically hungry people has surpassed the eye-popping one billion mark, with two thirds of them based in Asia Pacific, the planet's most populous region.
The "1billionhungry" project calls for a joint effort by national governments, the private sector and donor agencies to tackle food insecurity, which is on the rise despite promises from world leaders at summits like the G8 meeting in L'Aquila last July.
The web-based campaign aims to collect at least a million names on a petition pressuring politicians to make the elimination of hunger their top priority, and has gathered more than 101,000 signatures in just three weeks.
If the world continues at its current pace of hunger reduction, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the percentage of hungry people by 2015 will not be met, FAO says.
And longer-term, it estimates that global agricultural production must grow by 70 percent to feed the estimated 9 billion people that will inhabit the planet in 2050.
Sumiter Singh Broca, policy officer in Bangkok, told AlertNet an annual investment of $209 billion needs to be made in 93 developing countries for the next four decades to boost production dramatically in a way that reflects the trend towards higher consumption of meat, oils, fats and sugar.
"Remember, it is not enough to double food production, you must also make sure that the right kinds of food commodities are being produced (the ones people want)," he said.
So far that investment has not happened. Agriculture made up around 17 percent of development assistance in the 1980s, but by 2005, that proportion had dropped to 3.5 percent, Konuma said.
Last year, it bounced back to around 5 percent - a number Konuma described as "still very small". In addition, many developing countries themselves invest less than 10 percent of their budgets in agriculture, he noted.
CLOSING THE YIELD GAP
FAO says most of the food production boost required in the next 40 years will come not from an expansion in farmland Â? as it is becoming scarce and being sold off in growing quantities to foreign investors. Instead productivity will have to increase through improvements in agricultural technology, new crop varieties and more irrigation.
Poorer countries are still producing lower rice yields than wealthier agricultural societies, for example, a gap that can be closed. While many countries in Asia Pacific produce 2.5 to 3 tonnes of rice per hectare of land, the average yield in Japan, Korea and China is around 5 to 6 tonnes per hectare, according to Konuma.
"There's still room, through technological improvements, to increase productivity. This way, we may able to cope with the existing constraints," he said. "That's why investment in agricultural research, infrastructure and various support services is important."
Of the around one billion hungry people in the world, 642 million live in Asia Pacific, 265 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 million in the Near East and North Africa, and 15 million in developed countries.
From 2008 to 2009, both Asia Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa (where almost one in three people is undernourished) saw a 10 percent increase in the number of hungry people, according to FAO.
The organisation says the global economic slowdown - which came on the heels of the 2006-2008 food price spike - has left an additional 100 million people without access to adequate food.
Those two problems have exacerbated an already hostile climate for tackling global hunger - steadily declining investment in agriculture, changing dietary habits, extreme weather events, a widening gap between rich and poor, shrinking resources for food production and a growing global population.
As a result, the declining trend of undernourished people in developing countries reversed in 2008 and is expected to have increased again in 2009.
"Every six seconds you count, one child dies from hunger. Every day, 14,000 children die as a result of hunger. Every year 5 million children die from going hungry. It is very serious," Konuma said.
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