More than 850 million hungry people around the globe can enjoy a better life if the world sets aside less than 3 per cent of what it spends on purchase of arms every year, for development of agriculture.
Pointing out the stark realities of the wasteful spending, FAO director general Jacques Diouf on Tuesday appealed to world leaders for USD 30 billion a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food.
In his opening speech at the FAO's Rome Summit called to defuse the current world food crisis, Diouf noted that in 2006 the world spent USD 1.2 trillion on arms while food wasted in a single country could cost USD 100 billion and excess consumption by the world's obese amounted to USD 20 billion.
"Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find USD 30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?" Diouf asked.
"It is resources of this order of magnitude that would make it possible definitely to lay to rest the spectre of conflicts over food that are looming on the horizon," he added.
"The structural solution to the problem of food security in the world lies in increasing production and productivity in the low-income, food-deficit countries," he declared.
“This called for innovative and imaginative solutions, including partnership agreements... between countries that have financial resources, management capabilities and technologies and countries that have land, water and human resources”, he added.
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