Draft: World leaders launch $15B food initiative

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Draft: World leaders launch $15Bln food initiative

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO and EMMA VANDORE
Associated Press Writers


L'AQUILA, Italy (AP) -- World leaders have launched a $15 billion initiative to help farmers in poor countries increase production, marking a shift in the way the West tackles world hunger, according to a draft statement obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

Not all the money is new, and it will be distributed over three years. The United Nations welcomed the new strategy as an overdue shift away from the focus on delivering emergency food aid. Anti-poverty groups, however, said the funding was insufficient.

The new strategy is aimed at enabling poor farmers to produce more of their own food by improving productivity, shifting the focus from delivering aid. The initiative is a new approach on an issue - food security - that has emerged recently as a threat to political stability.

"There is an urgent need for decisive action to free humankind from hunger and poverty," said the draft statement. "We will aim at substantially increasing aid to agriculture and food security."

The initiative was launched at the end of three-day of talks in Italy of Group of Eight industrialized nations. The talks were expanded to include emerging economies and, on Friday, African nations. All of the 27 countries were expected to endorse the statement.

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"It's a total shift, a welcome and encouraging one," said Jacques Diouf, the chief of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

"You solve the problem of hunger by giving the necessary tools to farmers who are in these poor countries so they can produce food," Diouf told the AP.

The initiative calls for support around harvest time and puts emphasis on small farmers and private sector growth, as well as on families and women. It says that any improvement in agricultural production should be coupled with measures to help countries to adjust to changing conditions caused by global warming.