FAO warns hunger still stalks Asia

FAO warns hunger still stalks Asia

By Rene Pastor

MANILA (Reuter): The fastest-growing economies of Asia are crisscrossed by inequalities, leaving millions in hunger and deprivation, the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said on Monday.

He warned more must be done to boost food production.

"Despite your achievements, the region is criss-crossed by the faultlines of severe disparities," director-general Jacques Diouf said in a speech at the opening of a five-day regional FAO meeting attended by 35 Asia-Pacific nations in Manila.

The amount of arable land to fuel Asia's dynamic economies is shrinking as cities expand rapidly, so that increasing farm production is a daunting challenge, Diouf said.

"The challenge of supporting more than half of the world's population on 27 percent of its arable land is a formidable one for the region," said Diouf, a 56-year-old Senegalese diplomat who was elected director-general in November 1993.

"Behind our statistics of growth, millions of our people continue to succumb to hunger and poverty," Philippine President Fidel Ramos told the conference.

The conference is preparatory to an FAO World Food Summit in early 1996, at which threats to food security and plans to increase food output up to the year 2010 will be studied.

Diouf said the number of malnourished people in Asia had fallen to 528 million people in 1990 from 751 million in 1971 as governments around the region invested heavily in facilities to boost agricultural production.

The "Green Revolution" which sharply raised production of major crops like rice, the staple food for much of the region, has helped staved off hunger, Diouf asserted.

Food security in Asia has improved vastly since 1974 when doubts were expressed openly at the region's ability to feed its burgeoning population.

But millions still go hungry in south Asia and elsewhere, with hundreds of thousands of people crowding into upland areas or fragile coastal regions that cannot support them for long, Diouf said.

Livestock development, the use of biotechnology, and a strengthening of implementation skills will be crucial in heading off any threats to food security, he said.

"Realism demands that we address the issue of genetic resources, not in fragments but for all interlocking components in food and agriculture," the FAO director-general said.