Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-03-Speech-3-253"
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"en.20081203.19.3-253"2
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"For years, experts on the right to food at the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned the global public of the possibility of famine.
At a time when wealthy Western countries are burning food, more than 850 million people are starving across the world. Every five seconds, one child below the age of 10 dies from a lack of food. The rapid increase in the price of foodstuffs affects 2.1 billion people worldwide on a daily basis, many of whom are trying to survive on less than USD 2 per day.
The ever-increasing scale of biofuel production has contributed towards raising the price of foodstuffs, which has in turn had a large effect upon the people of the world. The price of foodstuffs has skyrocketed on the world market because an ever-increasing area of arable land is now being put aside to grow oil plants to be used as raw material in the production of biofuel (for example, to produce 50 litres of fuel, 200 kilograms of corn is needed, on which a Zambian or Mexican child could live for a whole year). In addition, several countries have suffered through drought or flooding, which has considerably decreased their harvest yield.
It is my view that the European Union should be willing to contribute more rigorously in its pursuit of the UN Millennium Development Goal: to halve world famine by the year 2015.
I welcome the European Commission’s initiative to direct EUR 1 billion into solving the foodstuff crisis. This will allow for the provision of EU food aid to the most disadvantaged people in order to satisfy their primary nutritional needs and contribute towards increasing the capacity of developing countries to produce their own foodstuffs.
At the moment, relatively little motor fuel is produced from edible crops in Europe. However, we should not sacrifice human foodstuffs purely for the sake of ‘green energy’. Rather, support must be given to scientific research with the goal of producing motor fuel from alternative sources. This would help to avoid an increase in the price of foodstuffs, and would also help to prevent famine and global warming."@en1
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