Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-276"
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"en.20080422.49.2-276"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it has been said that around 850 million people suffer from hunger or are undernourished each day. The curious thing is that the majority of these people live in the countryside and, would you believe, produce food themselves. This is bizarre. There is something very wrong there. We are now also faced with a tremendous increase in food prices. This is due to various developments, which have already been specified. Increasing prosperity in China and India and an increasing demand for meat products, the European and US objectives in relation to biofuels, rising energy prices…the list continues. The World Food Programme needs USD 7 million more this year in order to help the same number of people as last year. The consequences for the poorest people are immense.
New strategies will be required, first and foremost in the short term. In the near future we will have to supplement the shortfalls that exist within the World Food Programme. I am also happy with the Commissioner’s promises to deploy additional resources in order to achieve this, for example by bringing forward the expenditure on food aid that is anticipated for later this year and by drawing on the reserves for humanitarian aid.
However, according to an excellent proverb, prevention is better than cure. For that reason we must all look in particular at the longer term policy measures. How can we ensure that developing countries have a secure food supply? What can we encourage and how can we give them space? Do we know which of our policies or those of the IMF or World Bank support or pose a threat to food security? Can we not do more with our agricultural policy? I would like to ask the Commission to what extent food security has featured in the work programme up until now in recent years, because after all, globalisation has not come out of the blue.
As regards prevention being better than cure, I would like to refer to the success formula of the Hunger Project, an international organisation that has already achieved excellent, lasting results in various countries by means of an integrated approach. I would also like to point to the implementation of the joint strategy for Africa, the EU-Africa strategy. That strategy specifically devotes attention to a partnership for the development of the African agricultural sector. My question is how the Commission is also active in this respect."@en1
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