United Nations Radio

The task force set up by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to deal with the global food crisis aims to have a comprehensive plan in place to tackle the issue by the beginning of June.

John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and now one of two coordinators of the task force, said the idea is to bring people together to find and organize responses to the crisis. At a news conference in Geneva on Wednesday, Mr. Holmes said although the breadth and complexity of the issue needed to be recognized, there was no need to panic.

"I think it is clear we can fix these problems. The solutions can be found, the solutions are there. They are very difficult, some of them, in the short term, but they can be done. And this can also be seen as an opportunity, not least for agriculture in the developing world to move in a way that it's not done so for some time."

A global summit on the food emergency will be held in Rome from the 3rd to the 5th of June. Rome is headquarters to the 3 UN agencies dealing with the issue of food: the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization and IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Diane Bailey, United Nations Radio.

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