United Nations Radio

The heads of three United Nations agencies have called on the Group of 8 Summit to deal a decisive blow to hunger and poverty by increasing public financing to agricultural development.

In a joint statement issued in Rome, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization-FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development-IFAD and the World Food Programme-WFP, noted that one underlying cause of the current world food crisis was the dramatic decline in agricultural investment over the past three decades, when Official Development Assistance (ODA) tumbled from 17 percent of total to around three percent in 2006.

The three agencies say "the UN system is pulling together as perhaps never before" to protect vulnerable populations from the immediate dangers of the food crisis to meet the world's most urgent hunger needs.

The agencies warn of a colossal task ahead involving "nothing less than enabling the world's poor countries to feed themselves once more - a capacity they lost in the decades of cheap food imports and following a three-fold increase in natural disasters."

This is Donn Bobb reporting for United Nations Radio.

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