United Nations Radio

The head of the UN food agency on Friday welcomed the agreement by the Group of 8 industrialized countries to mobilize $20 billion over three years for agriculture.

Diouf at G8 Summit

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said the initiative, announced at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, signaled "a welcome and encouraging shift of policy in favour of helping the poor and hungry to produce their own food".

He urged the international donor community to devote, as soon as possible, 17 percent of Official Development Assistance to agriculture. It was that level of investment that had saved Asia and Latin America from famine in the 1970s.

A similar level of resources is needed now, Diouf said, to feed the more than one billion people suffering from hunger and to ensure that the world's population would have enough to eat in the year 2050, when the population would reach nine billion.

FAO plans a World Food Summit of Heads of State and Government in November to try and reach a broad consensus on eradicating hunger, better governance of the international agricultural system and on ways to ensure world food security.

Diane Bailey, United Nations.

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