UN and Islamic bank make $1bn farming deal

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
ROME: Funding from an Islamic bank will help develop agriculture in poor countries, a UN food agency said on Sunday ahead of a summit to discuss the so-far elusive goal of reducing the number of hungry people in the world.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is hosting the three-day summit starting on Monday, said it had reached a deal with the Islamic Development Bank for $1 billion in funding to help develop agriculture in poor countries that belong to both organisations. “This agreement comes at a critical moment, when the international community recognises it has neglected agriculture for many years,” the Rome-based agency said. “Today, sustained investment in agriculture, especially small-holder agriculture, is acknowledged as the key to food security.

Organisers of the gathering, to be attended by some 60 heads of state, agriculture ministers and other officials, hope to wean national policies away from long-standing emphasis on food aid and instead generate support for a new approach: help farmers, livestock herders and fishermen produce enough food for their own people.

UN officials point to villages in Kenya, Pakistan and Haiti to show this is possible.

In one Kenyan village, for example, an irrigation project is credited with not only reducing hunger there, but also allowing farmers to produce enough rice to sell surplus to the UN World Food Agency to help feed Africa’s hungry.

But past UN food summits have so far failed to meet their stated goals, including halving the number of the world’s hungry by 2015.

UN officials recently put the number of hungry at 1.02 billion, or roughly one out of every six people on the planet.

The last summit in June 2008 concentrated on how climate change and soaring food prices were undermining food security.

A draft declaration for this week’s summit would commit world leaders to the new strategy to increase agricultural development aid. But it does not include a 2025 deadline for eradicating hunger, a goal sought by the United Nations.

Also missing are specific funding pledges, such as the $44 billion in yearly agricultural aid that the Food and Agriculture Organisation says will be needed in coming decades.

Some critics were calling for other approaches. The international agency Oxfam said on Sunday that “money alone will not solve the problem,” and suggested instead that the UN could drastically reduce the 24,000 hunger-related deaths tallied daily around the globe if it was allowed by countries to coordinate their various initiatives.