U.N. Chief: World Needs 50% More Food

The U.N. secretary-general said Tuesday world food production must rise by 50 percent by 2030 to meet increasing demand.

Ban Ki-moon told world leaders at a food summit in Rome that nations must minimize export restrictions and import tariffs during the crisis that has caused hunger and riots across the globe.

Participants at the U.N. summit are trying to figure out how to head off skyrocketing food prices before millions more join the multitudes across the globe who already lack enough to eat.

In a message to the conference Pope Benedict told the massed world leaders that hunger and malnutrition are "unacceptable" in a world that has enough resources.

Benedict said in the message, which was read aloud Tuesday, that millions of people are looking to them for solutions while their very survival and their countries' security are at risk.

The Pope said the world has enough resources and know-how to end hunger and its consequences. He urged countries to make "indispensable" structural reforms to aid development.

The Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is hosting the three-day summit with the goal of averting a looming catastrophe of widening malnutrition and civil unrest among poor people unable to afford basic foodstuffs because of what the World Bank calculates has been an 83 percent increase in prices in the last three years.

Some 40 heads of state or government were expected at the summit, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The area around the agency's headquarters was closed to traffic, private cars were towed away and scores of police officers provided security as the delegates arrived early Tuesday.

Distracting from the crucial business at hand was the presence of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.

Australia's foreign minister decried as "obscene" Mugabe's participation in the summit. The longtime African leader has presided over the virtual transformation of his country from a former breadbasket to agricultural basket case riddled with mass poverty and hunger.

The Dutch ministry for overseas development pledged to "ignore" Mugabe during the summit. The U.S. representative said Mugabe was welcome to attend, but that no American officials would be meeting with him.

Price speculation, the increasing diversion of food and animal feed to produce biofuel, sharply higher fuel costs have all helped to shoot prices upward, experts say.

Ban also intended to request that the United States and other nations phase out subsidies for food-based biofuels, including ethanol.

But that could be difficult. Participants on the eve of the conference did not agree on even how much a role biofuels play in driving up food prices.

The United Nations is encouraging summit participants to start undoing a decades-long legacy of agricultural and trade policies that many blame for the failure of small farmers in poor countries to feed their own people

"We're calling for a renaissance," telling leaders at the gathering that "it is time to reinvest, reevaluate agricultural" policies, said Jim Butler, a Texan who is deputy director-general of FAO.

That's an ambitious goal, considering that a previous pledged-upon aim of halving world hunger by 2015 has proven steadily elusive.

The subsidies paid by wealthy nations to their own farmers makes it harder for small farmers in poor countries to compete in global markets, critics of such subsidies say. Butler said in an interview ahead of the gathering that a draft document that could be the basis for a final summit declaration doesn't promise to overhaul subsidy policy.

The U.S. Congress last month passed a five-year farm bill heavy on subsidies, bucking White House objections that such aid smack in the middle of a global food crisis wasn't warranted.

Heading the U.S. delegation to the summit, Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer insisted on Monday that biofuels contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.

Figures by other international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, show that the increased demand for biofuels is contributing by 15-30 percent to food price increases, said Frederic Mousseau, a policy adviser at Oxfam, a British aid group.

"Food stocks are at their lowest in 25 years, so the market is very vulnerable to any policy changes" such as U.S. or European Union subsidizing biofuels or mandating greater use of this energy source, Mousseau said.

Brazil is another large exporter of biofuels, and its president, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva was expected to defend biofuels at the summit.

Washington's ambassador to the Rome-based U.N. food agencies, Gaddi H. Vasquez, predicted in an interview that the summit would be a "critical first step in a global conversation on issues related to food security that will continue beyond the summit," including at this summer's G-8 in Japan.

But on Monday, several participants indicated they wouldn't even be talking to each other.

Aside from the criticism of Mugabe, Jewish leaders and some Italian politicians were among those denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attendance at the meeting. On Monday, Ahmadinejad repeated his call for the destruction of Israel, which is also participating in the summit.

Ahmadinejad was scheduled to give a summit news conference Tuesday afternoon.

EU sanctions against Mugabe because of Zimbabwe's poor human rights record forbid him from setting foot in the bloc's 27 nations, but those restrictions don't apply to U.N. forums.

Italian news reports said that neither Mugabe nor Ahmadinejad were among leaders invited to a working dinner Tuesday night in the hilltop Renaissance Villa Madama, an Italian government showcase.