Thursday June 5, 2008

UN invites private sector to Rome summit to help solve food crisis

ROME (AP): Alongside government leaders, international bankers and humanitarian aid officials, lobbyists from the seed to feed industry had an invited place in strategy sessions at the U.N. food crisis summit ending Thursday.

Farm-field industries are eager to be part of the United Nations' push to dramatically boost food production worldwide to combat hunger amid food prices predicted to stay high for years.

U.N. officials are happy to have them aboard.

'The U.N. is reaching out to the private sector for the first time,'' said Jim Butler, deputy director-general of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which has hosted the three-day gathering. Governments, humanitarian aid groups, multinational agencies and international banking institutions "can only do so much,'' Butler said in an interview in the run-up to the summit.

Butler chaired a session on Wednesday dedicated to evaluating how the private sector could help boost production by smallholder farmers in their countries so more poor won't be priced out of survival food.

U.N. chief Ban opened the summit Tuesday with a call for a 50 percent increase in food production by 2030 just so the world could keep up with the demands of growing mouths and more meat-based diets in China, India and other fast-developing nations.

"The seed sector is making better varieties to adapt the seeds to the area where they will be used or make them resistant to pests and pesticides,'' Marcel Bruins, a top official from the International Seed Federation, said at the round-table led by Butler. "We will continue to do and step up that.

Bruins said they were looking at ways to make "better yielding, resistant and nutritional'' seed International Feed Industry Federation head Fred Stephens called for investment in technology, including genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

"The resolution of the current global food crisis requires a decisive technological jump,'' Stephens said.

With much of Europe fiercely opposed to use of genetically modified products in its farmfields or on grocery store shelves, the possibility of using GMOs to boost quality or quantify of farm produce was conspicuously absent from many recipes offered at the summit to boost food production.

But U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told reporters that GMOS would have to play a role if the U.N. secretary-general's 2030 target for substantially higher production is to be realized.

"If we look at the substantial increases that are needed to feed the increase, not only the numbers of people in the world (but also) increased consumption as economies get better ... there just is no way we're going to meet it without being able to immediately put into play genetically modified foods,'' Schafer told reporters.

"Biotechnology allows up to step into that arena right away,'' Schafer said.

Discussion of how private business figured in meeting the U.N. anti-hunger goal also made dinner table talk at an evening hosted for the 44 heads of state or government who came to the summit.

Dinner participants "stressed the need for close partnerships with the private sector'' as part of the efforts to combat hunger, a summit statement said.

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